Walt, you wrote about recording M/S:
>I hardly ever use the decoder routinely anymore,
>mostly just monitor the mid in mono when recording M/S. The trouble with
>monitoring the stereo is you are too tempted to fiddle with the gain to
>adjust the stereo to your liking, which almost always means a weak
>recording on one channel, usually the side one. It's more important to
>get a good recording of both channels.
I'll give the argument for doing it the other way. There's a similar
situation in recording multi-track music. Some engineers record all
the tracks at the optimum level for the individual tracks, and adjust
the monitoring for a pleasant mix. Others keep the monitor faders in
a row, and vary the recording levels of the tracks so that a
first-draft mix is, as it were, printed to the multi-track master.
They know they can still make adjustments to that mix later, but it
won't be anything drastic.
If you're recording something that has a main source, like a bird
singing in front of you, of course your M channel will have
considerably more level in it than your S channel. Your S channel
isn't under-recorded; it should be lower. With digital recording you
have dynamic range to burn, and throwing away 10-20dB in this way
costs nothing, that's what it's there for.
I think a pre-balanced recording has better legs for the future. When
in a hundred years someone punches up my original recording from the
universal nature sound library, I'd rather it sounded good out of the
box, rather than needing a major adjustment.
Different strokes...
-Dan Dugan
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