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Why Does the Radius Nimbus Have Holes?
Oct 27,2023 | Pinknoisesystems
What makes the Radius Nimbus different than other slide-on furs or deadcats? This question has come up a lot recently. The short answer is its many of the little things (the foam, the fur, how its assembled, etc).
But when it comes to audio performance, the big difference comes from the “pepper pot holes" in the end cap.
Other deadcats that have a solid endcap cause additional pressure near the mic capsule, create an acoustic shadow in the back and also can add acoustic reflections. A solid endcap causes measureable changes to a microphone's polar patterns (makes a hypercardioid act more like a supercardioid, a supercardioid act more like a cardioid and a cardioid act more like an omni). It also causes smearing of frequencies which can add colouration to a microphone's natural sound. When on location listening through headphones, you might not even notice any of this distortion … or maybe when mixing you just take it for granted that you had to compensate for something picked up whilst recording.
Radius have observed that these effects vary in strength and size depending on the different microphones. The one thing that resolved almost all of these issues when they designed the Nimbus was adding “holes”. The small holes relieve the pressure buildup and also take away most of the effects of acoustic shadowing and reflection across frequencies – hence returning the microphone's polar pattern and response close to it's uncovered standard specifications.
Radius will be going into more details on their social media and website with graphs and additional examples with specific mics. But in the meantime, Radius hopes this helps you see how they are striving to improve upon their audio products.