From: Curt Olson <>
> Your purpose will dictate your priorities and the compromises you
> strike. My current experiments are aimed at coming up with the most
> natural-sounding array I can that is compact, light weight, highly
> portable and not terribly expensive. I'm not targeting distant
> individual callers at this point, only broad sound fields.
For this my weapon of choice is the SASS/MKH-20. The mics do make it
more costly initially. But it's hard to beat for wide, close
soundfields. The mics are also very long lived, so the cost is actually
spread over many years. The cost per year of recording is truly not
terribly expensive.
For distant individual callers I'd likely be using the Telinga. For more
moderate distances the MKH-60/30 M/S works well.
I've really gone away from the mono recording of single callers. I still
record single callers, but in the context of their audio scene.
> Another driving concept for me at the moment is that we are endowed
> with just one set of ears for our entire journey in this world. That
> one "setup" covers every situation in which we find ourselves. That's
> the model I have in mind -- one really good-sounding mic array that
> will cover a wide range of recording environments successfully. The big
> challenge, of course, is what Klause reminds us of:
>
> "Microphones are not ears,
> Loudspeakers are not birds,
> A listening room is not nature."
>
> So I may very well end up just like you and many others here, with
> several setups for different circumstances.
Your ears are actually a package with your cognative audio scene
analysis apparatus (your brain). You cannot separate them. That's what
mics lack, and why one mic will not cover all the ways we hear things.
One mic setup can provide something like one moment in our scene
analysis. Walk up to a audio scene and take it in as a whole (like the
SASS does), then notice the bird voiced treefrog calling in the nearby
woods (your ears just switched to the Telinga mode), then to a group of
bullfrogs on the far side of the pond (MKH-60/30 M/S). That's why I have
a set of mics.
Yes, the SASS does cover those more distant callers, so one could argue
that it's the universal mic. And leave picking out the distant callers
to the listener's scene analysis. But most listener's will prefer you
did some of the picking out for them.
Think how photography is done. You can use a fixed focal length lens for
everything, but to really convey it all you will probably use a variety
of focal lengths. Mics don't translate to focal lengths exactly, I think
more in audio scene shapes. But the idea is the same. (in fact our
brains have a lot in common between their visual scene analysis and
audio scene analysis)
Another photographic comparison is that our ears are zoom lenses, mics
are fixed focus lenses.
>>> With the advent of mixed/panned multi-mono recordings the true meaning
>>> of stereo has become blurred. It would have been good if there were
>>> two terms, one for the true and accurate recording of a 3d space, and
>>> a different one for the artificial mixed creations and "sound like 3d"
>>> recordings.
>
>
> I've done a lot of both. Each has its place, but you're right, there is
> a distinction.
I'm kind of a purist working on getting the audio scene in one take
without mixing. That, however, is not a value judgement on those
attempting to mix bits of different takes. The approach you use for each
is quite different. And you should decide before you record.
I've noticed this in things like how folks critique sound equipment.
Folks doing mixing have all kinds of potential problems with
incompatibilities between different recordings. This limits their choice
of equipment in a way that a single take person like I am does not even
have to consider. I believe I'm, therefore, less limited in my choice of
equipment. I can focus entirely on how well it does at reproducing the
sound scene.
Walt
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