David Picket: > Since people who like Decca Trees usually > like the phase effects that come with the setup,
When I started out recording in 69/70 I got a lot of help and suggestions from an old Swedish Radio recording engineer. He made it crystal clear that in his opinon when mixing spaced microphones in a reverberant space no phase effects or comb filtering of any sort could be heard even when listening in mono. The reason is simple, the mics are sufficiently spaced in a very reverberant room so the sound picked up by each mic are so different that no comb filtering or phase effects will occur ever. I share that view after 45 years of recording work. I have seen a lot of the internal litterature used by Swedish radio, Radio Denmark, Norwegian radio, German Radio for educating their employees in their internal schools etc and they all have come to the same conclusion. Discussion this point with Senior Recording Engineer John Dunkerley The Decca Record Company while sharing a pint of dark ale in the pub outside of the Belsize road Decca recording Centre in 1989 he agreed with that observation. I also see that former Philips International now Polyhymnia recording centre recording engineer Jean-Marie Geijsen shares that view too. http://tinyurl.com/nfxu86u As do I after having pressed that mono button thousand of times on location sessions using spaced recording techniques.. > Decca Trees sound nice on choirs because they do not have precise > stereo imaging and thus one cannot hear individual members of the > choir. When I hear musical forces in real life in reverberant spaces there is none of the highly directional effects heard from actual sound recordings. It´s all a blob of washed out sound in the middle with very little directional effects at all. A very spacious effect that is totally missing when I hear the same forces recorded via coincident mic techniques and no wonder as two cardioids in coincident X/Y excludes totally any difference in arrival time between the capsules while my ears are certainly NOT occupying the exact same spot instead they sit some distance apart and this gives my brain both amplitude AND timing information lost in the pure coicident recording systems. And no one sitting listening to this washed out and unstable real life sterophonic image seems to think it is wrong at all. It is only those hellbent on analyzing the sound coming out of a wooden box where they are all listening to different things to their liking telling all others they are wrong in their opinons. In that regard recordings are unreal to me personally and I prefer the less precise positional result from spaced techniques. BTW, Decca engineers have always insisted to have the nickel diaphragms on their M50 mics claiming that the later plastic diphragms sounded diffuse and inexact to them. Using two KM56 in A/B omni 60 cm spacing recording choir in a highly reverberant church has the diction perfectly clear on my beryllium equipped mid/top of my mobile monitor speakers. Going to soft dome plastic dome speakers the diction becomes unclear and muddled. So to me at least this is partly due to the choice of speakers and mics and not so much a question of spaced versus coincident techniques. The SM2 being two KM56 in one shell shows the same effect as do the KM88 they all have 0.7 µM nickel diaphragms. -- Best regards, Goran Finnberg The Mastering Room AB Goteborg Sweden E-mail: master...@telia.com Learn from the mistakes of others, you can never live long enough to make them all yourself. - John Luther (\__/) (='.'=) (")_(") Smurfen:RIP _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
