Re:Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad
by markrages on Friday April 03, 2020 @03:00PM
(#22772875)
Shorting the mic signal is not a straightforward solution. For one thing, you can just amplify your signal right back up to intelligibility, since 40-60dB attenuation doesn't go under the noise floor of a well-designed system.
Just send the mic signal through an op-amp with an enable input.
Re:Hardware Microphone Disconnect in Mac and iPad
by blattimwind on Friday April 03, 2020 @03:10PM
(#22772966)
Forward isolation is not necessarily much better than -60 dB depending on the exact op amp.
For digital microphones it can also be very simple. Consider a PDM microphone, if you disconnect the data line and have it stick to either high or low through a pull-up, the signal becomes DC. This wouldn't be pop-free by itself, but it should be rather easy to make it so through DSP.
(FWIW, you can also easily mute pro-audio microphones by shorting (+) and (-) together. The attenuation is determined by the output impedance of the microphone, usually a few hundred Ohms, divided by the resistance of your switch. Typically you'll get like 60 dB from this, which is perfectly fine for muting in a normal setup, but if you crank the preamp all the way up you can still get a usable, albeit very noisy, signal out of it.)