[Scott Dorsey]

Nick Brown wrote:
Interesting point. So when the two are combined the result would be...
comb filtering?

Well, that always happens when you put two mikes together unless they are
in precisely the same place in space.

I'm not clear what you mean by "condensers and dynamics (pressure)" -
taken literally it would seem to imply that all condenser mics are
pressure operated, even the hypercardioid Schoeps under discussion here,
even the single-diaphram figure-8 condensers (Schoeps MK8, Sennheiser
MKH30). That can't be right, can it?

An omnidirectional microphone is sensitive to air pressure. A figure-8
microphone is sensitive to air velocity. Cardioids, hypercardioids, and
supercardioids are sensitive to both in varying degrees.

If combining air pressure and velocity information is inherently flawed,
wouldn't that flaw be manifest in every cardioid mic ever? I thought
that was how the cardioid pattern was formed.

Cardioid microphones are inherently flawed and will always have frequency
response that changes with direction. In general, the closer you get to
the edges of the spectrum (omni and figure-8), the better the off-axis
response will be.

Consequently if you compare the Schoeps cardioid and hypercardioid capsules,
you'll find the hypercardioid is actually cleaner off-axis than the regular
cardioid.

There are various tricks you can play to regularize the off-axis response
and some of them work better than others. Most microphone vendors use
a few of them.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."