[johnzoidberg]

On my 12" PowerBook, I accidentally plugged my headphones into the line-in port instead of the headphone port. Do they use the exactly same kind of connectors, and if not, could I have accidentally damaged my PowerBook's audio line-in port?

[chabig]

Don't worry about it. The headphones put out much less of a signal than a microphone so they couldn't have damaged it.

Chris

[tooki]

And by "much less", he means "none."

They are the same connector.

tooki

[chabig]

Well, the headphones can put out a small signal. Just plug them into the microphone port and you can record from them.

Chris

[davidflas]

Originally posted by chabig:
Well, the headphones can put out a small signal. Just plug them into the microphone port and you can record from them.

Chris

That's true, and a microphone will function as a speaker as well.

[chabig]

They are both transducers, after all.

[tooki]

Most microphones cannot act as speakers. Only dynamic mikes (which are basically built the same as a speaker) can. The most common type (the electret mike), and the also common condenser mike all cannot reproduce sound, but they pick up sound very well. There are other types of mikes (whose names I can't remember) that are used in studio recording, and they are also incapable of producing sound.

Also, only dynamic mikes produce any output voltage, and it's tiny. It's not enough to be usable on a Mac, which requires a line-level input.

tooki

[madmacgames]

Originally posted by tooki:
Only dynamic mikes (which are basically built the same as a speaker) can. The most common type (the electret mike), and the also common condenser mike all cannot reproduce sound, but they pick up sound very well.

What? 1st the electret mic is a form of capacitor microphone (the terms capacitor and condenser can be used interchangeably when talking about mics, though capacitor is the now preferred term). And 2nd, it is widely agreed that the most common type of mic is most likely the moving coil dynamic microphone (your normal dynamic mic).

[tooki]

Dynamic mikes may be the most common for stage/live handheld mikes, but that's just about the only place they're used.

Computers, telephones, cellphones, answering machines, tape recorders and pretty much all small/cheap electronics use electret mikes nowadays because they're small, extremely cheap, lightweight, and not easily damaged. They're not used in professional audio because of their comparatively limited dynamic range, but they are omnipresent in most other applications where the limited dynamic range is not a problem.

I know that capacitor and condenser mean the same thing. In electronics (when not referring to mikes), "capacitor" has completely replaced "condenser". In mikes, however, "condenser" is still the by FAR more common term.

tooki

[tooki]

P.S. Wikipedia's article on microphones agrees with me that electrets are the most common type, by the way.