How does microphone gain work
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When you talk into a mic, the vibration creates a small voltage.
naturally this voltage is piss weak, so to become actually usable, the signal is “amplified” by increasing the voltage.
the more voltage “Gained” this way, the louder the sound is. How much voltage is input into it depends on how high you set the gain.
Microphones don’t really have gain. Microphones turn sound into an electronic signal. Different types of microphones or other audio equipment produce signals of varying strength.
Gain describes by how much a signal is amplified. For instance, mixing boards amplify input signals before passing them through EQ and effect filters. The idea is that you adjust preamplifier gain so that all the various input signals enter the mixer at the same strength relative to each other. This makes filtering and mixing way easier because all the signals emerge from their filters at roughly the same amplitude, after which each channel’s volume can again be adjusted for desired effect.
Preamplification normalizes input signal strength so that the final mix makes most efficient use of the system’s final output amplifier.
Also, what it doesn’t do: It does not change the parameters of the microphone regarding pickup pattern (polar pattern – where the mic pics up or rejects sound), or the current gain before feedback (turning down the gain and pushing the fader higher *does not* solve feedback issues)
“Gain” just makes everything louder.
The microphone turns the vibrations that make up sound into an electric signal, in the form of a voltage, which gets fed into an amplifier. The amplifier is connected to a voltage source (read: it’s plugged into the wall) that has a voltage much greater than the voltage it’s getting from the microphone. So what it does is look at the voltage from the microphone and give that signal some additional voltage from the socket. It’s a multiplier, so if it’s a gain of, 10, it’ll turn a 5 V signal into 50 V signal and a 2.5 V into 25 V and so on, but it cannot go above the voltage that it’s getting from the wall socket. Anyway, the more voltage you have, the more power you have. So whenever this new voltage signal is sent to a speaker, which is the opposite of a microphone — it turns voltages into vibrations, than that bigger voltage allows it to make bigger vibrations.
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