Talk:Microphone

42.116.116.78 and 58.186.14.2 (presumably the same editor) wants to change a dead reference link http://www.shure.com/americas/about-shure/history/index.htm to https://www.swanseaairport.com/history-the-evolution-of-an-audio-revolution. This new link is to an article with the same title as the old one but I very much doubt it is the same article. The ref is supporting "The SM58 has been the most commonly used microphone for live vocals for more than 50 years" and there is no mention of the SM58 (or any microphone) at this new link. I've already reverted this twice. Can someone else have a look? ~Kvng (talk) 13:32, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

Spammer from Vietnam. The www.swanseaairport.com website appears to be scraping the web to copy various articles and attract eyeballs. Binksternet (talk) 15:10, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm using angle of sensitivity as the angle of the cone that shotgun microphones are designed to pick up sounds. This would be really useful for users to know so that they know whether a shotgun mic is right for their application. Thanks.FreeFlow99 (talk) 14:54, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

I believe this will depend on the microphone. ~Kvng (talk) 14:41, 22 October 2021 (UTC)

Yes, it definitely will. "Shotgun" isn't a pattern; it's a method of construction, using an interference tube in front of the capsule. The result depends greatly on the length of the tube. At low and low-mid frequencies, where the length of the tube is a small fraction of a sound wavelength, the tube has little effect and the microphone basically has whatever pattern (often supercardioid) is inherent to its capsule. Above a transition frequency where the length of the tube is about a half-wavelength of the sound, the pattern narrows, but very irregularly; honest polar diagrams of shotgun microphones are quite unruly-looking, and their coloration of off-axis sound pickup is a notorious problem. But that transition frequency, as well as the degree of irregularity in the resulting patterns, depends greatly on the length of the interference tube. So professionals tend to use shorter shotguns when they can, and longer ones only when necessary. DSatz (talk) 22:50, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Impedance matching is a technically specific term in electronics: a circuit approach in which the receiving (load) impedance for a signal equals its sending (source) impedance. It's the ideal arrangement when maximum efficiency of power transfer is required. Early telephone systems used it, for example, and since early sound systems grew out of telephone systems, for those first few decades it was usual for sound equipment to have actual 600 Ohm inputs, or in some cases even 200 Ohms. In radio frequency circuits, impedance matching is still a very useful concept. However, modern microphone inputs (including just about everything designed in my 70+-year lifetime) use voltage transfer rather than power transfer. This requires "bridging" rather than "matching"--loads with impedance an order of magnitude greater than the source impedance. Studio microphones made in my lifetime generally have source impedances around 150-200 Ohms; transformerless condenser microphones often have even lower impedances, such as 25 to 35 Ohms--while the input impedance of a microphone input on a preamp, mixer or recorder is normally 1 kOhm, or even as high as 20 kOhm. This approach is thoroughly standardized, helps isolate the microphone from loading effects such as the resistance and capacitance of long microphone cables, and greatly reduces losses (which may be frequency-selective) in the impedance of the preamp, mixer or recorder input that the microphone is connected to. DSatz (talk) 23:14, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I've been using Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental large language model to create summaries for the most popular articles with {{Technical}} templates. This article, Microphone, has such a template in the "Shotgun" section. Here is the paragraph summary at grade 5 reading level which Gemini 2.5 Pro suggested for that section:

A shotgun microphone is a special kind of microphone that's really good at picking up sound from one direction, usually right in front of it. It has a long tube with slots or holes along the side. This tube helps block out sounds coming from the sides, letting the microphone focus on the sound it's pointed at. Because of how it works, it might sometimes pick up a little bit of sound from behind it too.

While I have read and may have made some modifications to that summary, I am not going to add it to the section because I want other editors to review, revise if appropriate, and add it instead. This is an experiment with a few dozen articles initially to see how these suggestions are received, and after a week or two, I will decide how to proceed. Thank you for your consideration. Cramulator (talk) 12:49, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

@Cramulator: Wow, thank you for your efforts! My initial reaction is that grade 5 is too simple for the English Wikipedia's encyclopedic tone. It's more in line with what I would expect on Simple English Wikipedia. Specifically, I'm bothered by the phrases "a special kind of", "really good", "because of how it works", "a little bit of", and "too". May I suggest the following edit?

A shotgun microphone is a type of microphone that's designed to pick up sound from one direction, usually right in front of it. It has a long tube with slots or holes along the side. This tube helps block out sounds coming from the sides, letting the microphone focus on the sound it's pointed at. As an artifact of this design, it might sometimes pick up some sound from behind it as well.

Thanks again! — voidxor 14:40, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words. I've just been told that the target grade level for STEM articles is grade 9, so I'm going to re-run them at that level and try to fold the results in as alternative suggestions.

I think your version is much better, and am glad to have spurred you to think about addressing the issue. Cramulator (talk) 14:44, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Use of LLM needs to be discussed by the entire Wikipedia community, not just those interested in one article. You can start at WP:Village pump. Sundayclose (talk) 15:24, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

@Sundayclose: If we were sourcing claims from an LLM, that would be nearly impossible to cite and thus fail WP:V. In this case, Cramulator is merely feeding it a section that already exists here, and asking the LLM for a simpler summary. I don't have a problem with that so long as existing references are kept and applied to the reworded text.

In other words, they are using the AI as a writing aid, not as a source of information. — voidxor 15:34, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I didn’t say it was used as a source. My point is that suggesting widespread rewrites with LLM before discussing with the entire Wikipedia community is not the way to proceed. OP has suggested this on numerous articles, not just this one. That's not a criticism of OP, just a caution. I've used AI to help me write about articles on which I have expertise, but I would never suggest a shotgun approach for articles in general. That's a slippery slope. Sundayclose (talk) 15:52, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

I am retracting this and the other LLM-generated suggestions due to clear negative consensus at the Village Pump. I will be posting a thorough postmortem report in mid-April to the source code release page. Thanks to all who commented on the suggestions both negatively and positively, and especially to those editors who have manually addressed the overly technical cleanup issue on six, so far, of the 68 articles where suggestions were posted. Cramulator (talk) 00:16, 5 April 2025 (UTC)

Oh my. We have enough trouble with human-based hallucinations. Please don't add AI to the mix as this project will e even less coherent and rational. Have you seen some of the utter nonsense produced by Google AI, for example? Not ready for prime time, not ready for anythign to do with this project. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:25, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

Again, the proposal above was for using LLM for help summarizing what is already on Wikipedia, not as a source of facts. Please read the whole thread before weighing in, lest you want to introduce more prejudicial opinion. How about weighing in on the proposed summary paragraph above instead of blindly offering your opinion on AIs in general? — voidxor 19:02, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

My recommendation for a summary is that it be written by caring and thoughtful human beings, and that an artificial stupid doesn't come within a furlong of contributing to any Wikipedia article. There's no value-added in using the current versions of LLMs to do anything with encyclopedia content. They are the biggest scam to come along since crypto. --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:26, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

@Headbomb: I'm genuinely curious. Why are we making this change? That particular source is clearly an article within a journal, not a chapter of a book in the traditional sense (i.e. same author or authors write the whole book). If it were me, I'd be going the other way and using {{Cite conference}}, as it says, "Event: 10th Meeting on Optical Engineering in Israel, 1997, Jerusalem, Israel."

P.S. I'm a big believer that edit summaries should explain the 'why' of the edit; other editors can see the 'what' by looking at the diff. — voidxor 13:53, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Agreed. Some conferences do publish a 'book' as their proceedings, but in this case we don't even seem to have an ISBN for it. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:06, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

First, cite conference is a garbage template that should be avoided because it makes you put things in it that are not bibliographically irrelevant. Second the Proceedings of the SPIE are published in books, not journals so a cite book is appropriate. If you want the ISBN for that book, it's ISBN 9780819425324. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:13, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

@Headbomb: Thanks, but I still don't follow the reason for the change. Your statement about {{cite conference}} is purely your opinion (which you are welcome to). Otherwise, it wouldn't exist. Feel free to take it to TfD.

As far as it being a book and not a journal, can you explain further? I mean, in the literal publishing sense I suppose journals are a subset of books. (And maybe they often have ISBNs too, so let's not get distracted.) The difference is that a traditional book is written by the same author or authors throughout, and is reviewed and published as a single entity. By contrast, a journal is a collection of papers by different authors, each reviewed individually for inclusion. A journal is often hundreds of pages long, and we're only referencing one paper that's a few pages long.

Either there's a legit reason that {{cite journal}} or {{cite conference}} shouldn't be used in this particular instance (that I'm still not understanding; they seem like the proper templates to use to me), or you are going around changing journal to book to make some sort of point. I feel like that sort of thing should be done with consensus (again, TfD might be the proper forum). Your sharp opinion above doesn't instill confidence. — voidxor 18:57, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

The legit reason is that the proceedings are published in a book series, not a journal, and that cite conference shouldn't be used because it makes you populate its parameters with stuff that shouldn't be in it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:24, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, you made those points and I hear you. I still consider your statement on {{cite conference}} to be your opinion; I'll still use the template myself unless it's successfully run through TfD. Surely we have the template for a reason.

As to book vs. journal: Again, a journal is a specific type of book, just like textbooks and diaries are also technically books too. So to clarify my question: I'm not asking why it's a book; I'm asking why it's not a journal. Like the conference one, we must have the {{cite journal}} template for a reason. I plan to continue using it for what I think are the appropriate usage cases (journals, which are also technically books).

FYI, here's a list of Proceedings of SPIE by volume number. The fact that there are volume numbers (and thousands of them) reinforces my stance that it's a journal. — voidxor 20:14, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

"Proceedings of the SPIE are published as individual books." Each book is edited by the conference chairs, and, as most conference proceedings do, have a rather loose peer review process going on.

Formally, individual papers are edited book chapters, and should be cited as edited books chapters. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:59, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

This is no different than say,

Audrito, Giorgio; Beal, Jacob; Damiani, Ferruccio; Pianini, Danilo; Viroli, Mirko (2019). "The share Operator for Field-Based Coordination". In Riis Nielson, H.; Tuosto, E. (eds.). Coordination Models and Languages. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11533. Cham: Springer. pp. 54–71. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22397-7_4. hdl:2318/1711784. ISBN 978-3-030-22396-0.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:02, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. My concern is—as I suspected might be the case—you are looking to an outside style manual (in this case, APA) for citation style. While Wikipedia articles may use APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, etc. for short citations (which are not being used here) per WP:CITESHORT, for long citations we use our in-house styles CS1 and CS2 (see WP:CITESTYLE). Our in-house styles were created as a middle ground among the outside style manuals, since that was much fought over in the early days of Wikipedia. Our citation templates are geared to implement the consensus-based standards in CS1 and CS2. For an editor to say that APA (or whatever outside manual) is correct concerns me because I know it's going to go against the evolutionary direction here. For an editor to then use scripts or semi-automated tools to enforce that will amplify the issue.

With that said, you may be right about SPIE conferences being edited and published differently than other conferences. I simply don't know enough about that to comment, so I'm going to defer on that issue. But, my above warning about chucking out CS1 templates because of editor preferences remains. Thanks again, and happy editing. — voidxor 00:23, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

My main concern here is whether we're citing the conference or the book of the conference. If we're citing a particular speech or even a paper delivered at that conference, then cite the conference. If we're citing something from the paper book, then cite the book. Especially if we're using page numbers and links to the online text, rather than conference sessions. Of course there's overlap (and for most well-run conferences this will be equivalent) but it does happen that texts vary between the two, or many presentations don't form part of the published version. Andy Dingley (talk) 19:54, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

No one can "cite a conference", what's published are the conference proceedings. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:02, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Yes, we know you have your own little axe-grind about how we're all doing it wrong. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, unless you're somehow citing a slideshow that was made at a conference. But we have the template, so I've always used the template for the conference proceedings. — voidxor 20:14, 29 July 2025 (UTC)