Hi everyone,
My apology for not answering earlier. A little awkward :-[ but I started this thread and subsequently could not find it in prodigy's search system so assumed it was "gone" for some reason.
Regarding what humans can hear/feel I have attached a link to a website - the journal of neurophysiology, search for: "Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect" - that I find quite interesting.
See
www.jn.physiology.org .The authors have - in what to me appears to be a scientific way - investigated the objective (measurements on the brain) and subjective effects of in- or excluding frequencies above 22 kHz, if I remember correctly. Please note that I attach this not with the intention of "opening" a discussion, more like an input of information, if you are interested.
There's also this article:
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm
@ abbey road d enfer:
The inductive nature of the source
Hmmm... but wouldn't the inductance be very low? It's a few centimeters of straight wire ... The transformer, yes, but would the wire/ribbon itself cut off at ~15 kHz?
And then I have been considering how it would work if a ribbon was used as a sort of "ventilated pressure" microphone? I.e. like the Neumann TLM 50 but with a variable "length and size" opening in a sphere similar to the TLM50's?
Regarding the sensitivity of the microphone: Do you know if it is possible to transfer the magnetic flux from e.g. a thick neodymium magnet through a medium of some kind to the place where the ribbon is? The idea is to have a much smaller structure around the ribbon, thus hopefully enabling a much higher cut-off frequency.
@zebra50: Yups, know about marketing issues (worked ~7 years in a quite serious audio retailer). But hope to get/think around/beyond them :
To me the ribbon has some potentially interesting qualities: no tensioning, low resonance frequency, very low impedance, thus
in itself less susceptible to stray electromagnetic fields, very low weight. I also find some drawbacks, like the bandwidth, and the exceptionally low output!, but hope they may be overcome ...
Thanks for reading & maybe replying
Jesper