Combining electret microphones?

Other Hardware Audio
1

Hey,

New to the forum but not new to Arduino! I have a silly question that I just couldn't find the answer to online.

I'm building a box that needs to pick up audio from multiple directions. Audio quality isn't that important- the sound should be distinct.

What happens if I connect two or three electret microphones together? What will the output be? I figure it won't be anything usable, but I couldn't find anything online about it.

Thanks!

Ben

2

I'm building a box that needs to pick up audio from multiple directions. Audio quality isn't that important- the sound should be distinct.

What happens if I connect two or three electret microphones together? What will the output be?

If you connect them together* you won't get any directional information!

Do you know how to connect one electret? It requires power, an amplifier, and a biasing circuit. (Or you can buy a board from SparkFun will the mic and the circuitry.)

The Arduino has 6 analog inputs, and you can connect each mic to a separate input.

Note that an electret mic by itself is non directional (omnidirectinal). It's slightly more sensitive from the front, and mostly at high frequencies. At low & mid frequencies it picks-up sound nearly equally from all directions.

  • You'd need a mixer (a summing amplifier) or resistive mixer circuit if you wanted to mix the signals, but you don't want to do that anyway.