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3. Re: Mono v. Stereo

Subject: 3. Re: Mono v. Stereo
From: "Raimund Specht" animalsounds
Date: Wed Dec 31, 2008 8:53 am ((PST))
Walt, it seems that we have just found another controversial topic 
after a long period of silence ;-)

In my previous posts I forgot to mention another important argument 
against the stereo recording option for common scientific field work: 

Imagine, you would use a XY stereo setup instead of a conventional 
single shutgun microphone. It is true that the stereo setup would 
perhaps allow you to isolate different individuals or noise by ear. 
However, the down-side would be that the overall signal-to-noise 
ratio of the stereo recording would be most likely worse than the 
conventional shotgun microphone recording. The narrower receiving 
angle of the shotgun microphone would effectively attenuate 
disturbing noise arriving from other directions, which would not be 
the case for the much wider receiving angle of the stereo microphone. 

Scientific work usually involves spectrographic analysis for 
measuring time and frequency parameters, which requires the best 
possible signal-to-noise ratio that you can get. In other words, the 
stereo setup would actually limit the analysis because its background 
noise level is increased compared to the shotgun recording. 
Unfortunately, there is no simple way to extract the spatial 
information of a stereo recording into a spectrogram. Theoretically, 
one could try to use a beam-forming approach, but I'm afraid that 
this wouldn't work very well in practice.

Regards,
Raimund




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