When designing a microphone assembly the other day, I reached for an electret condenser microphone capsule without thinking. To be strictly accurate I ordered a pack of them, these small cylindrical ...

There are different kinds of microphones, but they all do about the same thing, which is to turn acoustic sounds into electronic signals that can be amplified, modified, or recorded. When you speak ...

Using a speaker as a microphone is a trick old enough to have become common knowledge, but how often do you see the hack reversed? As part of a larger project to measure the acoustic power of a ...

Fig. 1: Diagrams from Wente’s 1916 patent application show the condenser microphone in cutaway view. Diaphragm (#6), which is grounded, is stretched only 5/10000th of an inch from the backplate (#7), ...

Any modern phone call placed, voice recording captured, karaoke song belted or conversation amplified via hearing aid would not be possible without James West. West, now a professor of electrical and ...