Polar pattern

Polar pattern describes how sensitive a microphone is to sound arriving from different directions, plotted as a shape around the capsule. Cardioid is heart-shaped and favors the front, omnidirectional picks up evenly from all around, and figure-8 favors front and back while rejecting the sides, each suited to different recording situations.

A solo podcaster speaking straight into a mic on a boom arm usually wants a cardioid pattern to reject room noise from other directions. Two people facing each other across a table might prefer a figure-8 pattern on a single mic, while a roundtable discussion with several voices might call for an omnidirectional mic placed centrally.

Some microphones are fixed to a single pattern, while multi-pattern condensers let a user switch between several depending on the recording setup. Matching the polar pattern to the actual seating arrangement in the room, rather than defaulting to whatever pattern came with the first mic purchased, often solves problems that seem like a mic quality issue but are really a pattern mismatch that a quick settings change would fix.