Active Ribbon mic with balancing board

Hi everyone,

This may well have already been covered but im interested in either finding this info or getting everyone to chime in with some ideas and info.
I am building several different ribbon mic elements and exploring different tensions and thickness of ribbons and also finding the resinanace of the foil.
I was thinking it would be a nice cheap option to have a balancing board in there rather than a transformer just would need to voltage drop the 48v to 15/18v for the IC after the active circuit. Im well up for prototyping this and etching my own pcbs as have done quite a few now and they seem to work nice as i can tin plate them as well which seem to help a lot.

Obviously the ohmage is important as i think the SSM2142 i have been using for everything else i think is 50ohm to 600ohm and it would need to be much lower ohmage for ribbon mic so would need to find an IC which could accomodate this?

I havent found a definitive actice circuit yet either if anyone could suggest a good one please.

Also wanted to put a low cut in there with a 3 way switch, something like 85hz cut and a 175hz cut.

any help is much appreciated.

regards

Spence.

HI Guys,

with more investigation what i am meaning is to run a transformerless ribbon mic with some sort of IC circuit replacing the transformer i.e in the style of the line balancer for unbalanced units which would normally have a transformer.
I have been told this cant be done as the impedance is way to low (0.1ohm or 0.2ohm) and need to come up to 50ohm.
Is there a way of increasing the impedance up to a point where it is workable with an IC circuit with something else?
Im probably barking up the wrong tree here but im pretty sure ive seen some transformerless mics on the market?

regards

Spence.

Spencerleehorton said:

Is there a way of increasing the impedance up to a point where it is workable with an IC circuit with something else?

Click to expand...

Yes.  You use a transformer to do this.  Any other method gives TERRIBLE results.

I think the only transformerless ribbon I have ever come across is this curio from Shaftesbury…

http://xaudiaelektrik.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/motm-shaftesbury-velodyne-supreme.html

But the real beauty of ribbon mics is the simplicity - magnets, ribbon, transformer, done!