Image: Microphone - Bayernhof Museum - DSC06319

Description: Exhibit in the Bayernhof Museum, 225 St. Charles Place, O'Hara Township, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction. This is a Western Electric double-button carbon microphone, invented at Bell Laboratories in the early 1920s Extremely widely used in broadcasting until the 1930s, it is also called the "ring and spring" microphone because the microphone unit is suspended by springs at the center of a support ring to isolate it from vibrations of the stand. Inside the microphone unit there is a stiff aluminum diaphragm with two cylindrical chambers or "buttons" with carbon granules between two electrodes, attached to each side of the diaphragm. The button pickups are connected to a center-tapped audio transformer in a "push-pull" circuit, which cancels the high 2nd harmonic distortion due to carbon's nonlinear response to pressure, and the thin diaphragm had high resonant frequency and was damped by an air cell to reduce it's Q, resulting in a much flatter frequency response and lower distortion than other carbon microphones.
Title: Microphone - Bayernhof Museum - DSC06319
Credit: Own work
Author: Daderot
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication
License: CC0
License Link: http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en
Attribution Required?: No