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Microphone arrays sample the sound field in both space and time with the major objective being the extraction of the signal propagating from a desired direction-of-arrival (DOA). In order to reconstruct a spatial sinusoid from a set of discrete samples, the spatial sampling must occur at a rate greater than a half of the wavelength of the sinusoid. This principle has long been adapted to the microphone array context: in order to form an unambiguous beampattern, the spacing between elements in a microphone array needs to conform to this spatial Nyquist criterion. The implicit assumption behind the narrowband beampattern is that one may use linearity and Fourier analysis to describe the response of the array to an arbitrary wideband plane wave. In this paper, this assumption is analyzed. A formula for the broadband beampattern is derived. It is shown that in order to quantify the spatial filtering abilities of a broadband …