At 2:42 PM -0400 8/24/06, Walter Knapp wrote:
<snip>
>To me a better mic does not produce resonance or mess with the sound but
>accurately produces a signal that's a clear and accurate representation
>of the sound that arrived at the mic.
We may have different understandings or expectations of the
capabilities or accuracies of recording systems including mics. I
think my hearing is pretty good. For web file exchanges and
conversations like this, I use headphones.
>
>A lot of the resonance that's talked about with studio mics is a
>function of the recording room interacting with the mic design. The
>recording "room" of outdoor sites is rather large with extremely complex
>resonance of it's own. To think you are going to get the simple
>resonance of the studio outdoors seems a bit simplistic as is choosing
>mics based on studio use. Nature recording is a field of it's own, not
>some branch of studio recording. I work at things like getting a clearly
>defined echo from each treetrunk of the forest. If the mic is adding
>resonance
My understanding is that every component in the recording chain
contributes qualities. With reverberant field recording, tonal
imbalances, including resonance are pretty much given. I accept these
imperfections and I believe trying to understand it helps me.
> it just interferes. The same holds for overprocessing the
>recording afterwards. One of the reasons why I don't like unattended
>remote recording, I then don't really know what it sounded like out there.
"Out there" being where you stood or where your mics were? Our
brains "form" most of what we perceive through inference even if we
are listening to the same sound file on the same model headphones.
With this in mind, its easy to see why many recordists feel that mic
technology is perfect enough. I enjoy trying to connect and better
understand the imperfections that are the systems we live in, I'm
sorry if the rubs anyone in the wrong way. Rob D.
>
>Walt
>
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