4 Condenser Mic Terms You Should Know Before Buying
Sound waves, how a mic works, sensitivity and max SPL: learn the condenser mic terms every vlogger and streamer should know before buying one.
For vloggers and streamers, recording gear matters. Creators who want high-quality audio should buy a condenser microphone, which picks up even weak, quiet sounds and helps cut noise, so the videos they upload are pleasant to listen to. The best condenser mics come with a few terms every vlogger should understand. Here are the 4 terms to know.
4 Terms You Need to Know About Condenser Mics
- Sound Waves
You hear this term a lot, but few people really understand it. When you pluck a guitar string, you hear a disturbance that ripples through the air. That disturbance is a sound wave. A sound wave is drawn as a graph with an amplitude. The distance from one point on a wave to the same point on the next wave is the wavelength. Amplitude is usually equated with loudness and is drawn as the height of the crest of the wave.
- How a Microphone Works
Microphones come in two main types, but this section covers only one. The working principle inside the best condenser mics is a capacitor. Its job is to pick up sound well, even sound with very little power. Incoming sound waves make the plate at the front of the capacitor, known as the diaphragm, move. The sound then travels toward the back and changes the capacitance.
- Sensitivity
Sensitivity is a reliable benchmark for the electrical output a microphone can produce. If you want to test a mic's quality, this is a precise and dependable method. You can also use it to compare several mics and see how sensitive each one is. A mic with a higher output voltage usually has higher sensitivity and picks up sound better than the others.
- Maximum Sound Pressure Level
Another way to test a mic's performance is its maximum SPL, or sound pressure level. It is measured in decibels (dB) and tells you how much volume the mic can handle without distortion. With it, you can also pick the best condenser mic for high-quality video. What a microphone can capture is a yardstick for video quality, because the sound has to be clear.
Creators on social media rely on capable gear so their videos can compete with everyone else's. Competition in the creative industry is fierce, so owning a top condenser microphone for high-quality recordings matters a great deal. There are 4 terms to know before you step into this world: sound waves, how a microphone works, microphone sensitivity, and maximum sound pressure level (SPL).
