scb wrote:
> I might have to break my no-hypers rule for these
A rule like that would rarely need be broken, because very few actual hypercardioid microphones exist. Most microphones that are said to have a hypercardioid pattern are closer to being supercardioids. That's true of Neumann, AKG, Beyer and others, while Schoeps and Sennheiser call theirs supercardioids (although their actual directional patterns are hardly any different from those of Neumann or AKG).
The polar diagram of a true hypercardioid would look much like that of a figure-8, but with a somewhat shrunken rear lobe; its sensitivity at 180° is only 6 dB less than its sensitivity at 0°. (For a true supercardioid that difference is around 11.7 dB.)
--Just one note about the polar diagrams that were posted earlier in this thread, which as someone pointed out, are NOT those of the model that this thread is mainly about: Any variation in the pattern at different frequencies means that for different angles of sound incidence (arrival), the microphone will have different frequency response, i.e. sound arriving at different angles won't sound the same. That's no problem in typical studio applications--but it's a severe disadvantage for stereo recording with coincident or closely-spaced pairs of microphones.
--best regards