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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