Will Phantom Power Kill My Ribbon Mic

In the studio many engineers and assistants are afraid of hooking up a ribbon microphone fearing that they may damage it. So is there truth to ribbon microphones being damaged by phantom power? Yes, you can damage a ribbon microphone with phantom power, but not in the way that you think. If you have a ribbon microphone hooked up to a preamp and you accidentally hit phantom power, you aren’t going to hurt it. If you are using good cables and nothing is shorted, you can send phantom power to a ribbon mic all day and it won’t hurt it. So what causes phantom power to hurt a ribbon mic? The patch bay. If you already have phantom power on and you plugin or patch a ribbon mic, you run the risk of sending that 48vdc to parts of the microphone that aren’t suppose to receive it and you will most definitely damage you microphone. So how do you prevent this? READ MORE