Sennheiser
MKH 416
Small-diaphragm condenser · Supercardioid · 40–20,000 Hz · a rider regular
- The film-and-television shotgun — on booms since the 1970s and still the default reference every other shotgun is described against.
- Above roughly 2 kHz an interference tube narrows the pattern into a forward lobe that a first-order polar plot cannot draw — the diagram here shows the supercardioid the capsule behaves as lower down.
- RF-condenser design, which is why it keeps working in humidity that puts conventional condensers out of action.
Frequency response
No response curve yet.
MicSense only draws a curve traced from a graph the manufacturer actually publishes — it never estimates one from the microphone’s class. Sennheiser publishes figures for the MKH 416 but no response graph, so the numbers are in the spec table below and the chart stays empty.
Polar pattern
Generated from the first-order directivity formula for supercardioid. It illustrates the pattern type — it is not a measurement of this individual model.
Specifications
| Manufacturer | Sennheiser |
|---|---|
| Model | MKH 416 |
| Type | Small-diaphragm condenser |
| Form factor | Shotgun |
| Polar pattern | Supercardioid |
| Frequency range | 40–20,000 Hz |
| Sensitivity | 25 mV/Pa · ≈ -32.0 dBV/Pa |
| Max SPL | 130 dB SPL |
| Self-noise | — |
| Impedance | 25 Ω (nominal) |
| Connector | XLR3M |
| Powering | phantom 48 V |
| Weight | 175 g |
| Price tier | Premium |
| Introduced | — |
Every figure above is from Sennheiser’s own published datasheet for this model — see the datasheet. A dash means the manufacturer does not publish that figure; it does not mean zero.
What it gets used for
- Broadcast
- Theatre lav
MicSense tags microphones by the job on a live stage, not by studio category — so you can filter for “kick in” or “monitor vocal” instead of working backwards from “large-diaphragm condenser”.
Compare it against the alternatives.
MicSense lets you put up to four microphones side by side — spec table, overlaid response curves and polar diagrams on one screen. Free with a free Squaresmile account.