Let the observer have cylindrical coordinates and total distance . At retarded emission time , the source-observer distance is
The retarded time relation consequently becomes
Set . Then
The observer-direction Mach number at emission is . For a constant strength and , the single retarded root has . Substituting into the moving-source field gives the rotating acoustic point source result
In particular, on the rotation axis and the result is .
For a genuinely varying source strength, replace by in the last formula. If , the retarded relation need not be one-to-one: each retarded root contributes with in the denominator. The general result is a sum of . Dropping the absolute value and the root sum requires the subsonic assumption. At the ideal point-source expression has a caustic; finite source size and bandwidth regularize that idealization.