Evan: hey yo
Mark: yo
Evan: have you ever heard of using a speaker as a microphone?
Mark: sure.
Evan: weird
Evan: lol was reading about it just now and these guys were using it
as a kick drum mic
Mark: yeah
Evan: that's kinda cool. when i read how it works it made more sense.
Mark: it's really simple
Evan: it is? lol
Mark: yeah.
Mark: microphones
Mark: guitars
Mark: amps
Mark: all the same.
Mark: you know how electricity is made?
Evan: hmmm
Evan: does it have to do with magenetic energy?
Mark: yeah.
Mark: you take a magnet
Mark: and you take a piece of metal
Mark: and you move the piece of metal in and out of the magnetic field
Mark: the moving in and out of the electric field is what produces the
energy.
Mark: now you can see how a guitar does this
Evan: true
Evan: those pickups are magnets
Evan: well
Evan: they contain magnets
Evan: and when you hit the strings that moves metal
Mark: yep.
Mark: now a microphone does this too
Mark: a little piece of metal (the diaphragm) moves in and out of a magnetic
field
Mark: the frequency of the electricity it creates - a really small amount,
which is why you need amplifiers and preamplifiers
Mark: is based on the frequency of the vibration
Mark: now when you want to make a speaker
Mark: you amplify this bit of energy
Mark: and send it to - you got it, a piece of metal
Mark: which attracts & repulses a magnet
Mark: fast enough to make sound
Evan: crazy
Mark: and vibrate a piece of paper
Mark: so you can see how it's easy to just reverse the whole thing
Evan: cool
Evan: :P
Mark: :P
Evan: thanks mr wizard
Mark: ;-) now do you want to learn kung fu?
Evan: they said that it would cut of higher frequency
Evan: why?
Mark: probably because the diaphragm is so big, and the magnet is so
big and heavy that it's hard to move.
Mark: it won't move quickly
Mark: they're just using a woofer. a tweeter would move fast, but wouldn't
capture the lower frequencies as well
Evan: an 8 inch
Evan: was in the tutorial
Mark: yeah. well it's not a 1/2" tweeter
Evan: true
Evan: if you wanted higher frequencies couldn't you use a tweeter?
Mark: it would probably be better just to use a microphone at that point. if you wanted the higher frequencies, a speaker would probably distort them quite a bit, but then again maybe that's the sound you want.
Mark: a speaker magnet is always going to be heavier than a microphone
diaphragm, well except maybe headphone speakers
Evan: hmmm
Evan: so it's always gonna be harder to generate a signal then
right?
Mark: basically. it's not the "right" tool for the job, but it can be cool for giving a different sound, like a vintage distorted speaker sound, only you're doing it in reverse so it won't be quite the same.
I think this modern digital world and the delicacy of it all - you can't go past digital 0db or you get horrible clipping, rather than the soft tube or magnetic tape saturation. Plus all the speakers we have nowadays are self-powered, so it's impossible to use them this way. You really don't want to feed an extra hot voltage into a computer! but it wouldn't have been so much of a problem with a tape recorder.
It's unfortunately that this kind of environment exists because it discourages experimentation. All the tools are virtual, and you can't touch them anymore. You can't rewire a virtual mixing desk. Though, it's not all bad, digital does give us some cool things that didn't exist in the analog world, like Impulse/Response reverb, which I'm a big fan of, and the ability to quickly chop up audio samples, reverse them, distort them, EQ them, and slide them back in to the mix without affecting any of the other tracks.
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