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Maybe...

Maybe a room designed to hold 1,000 people isn't the best room to record an orchestra! These conversations always seem to boil down to un-amplified orchestral music or something in a concert hall designed to project what is ultimately the sound of a vocal or violin soloist.

"Really nice hearing Jack Renner talk about his minimal miking technique modeled after the Mercury Living Presence recordings from the 50s."

Seen this in a few photos of sound-stages - a couple mic's hanging from their chords in a large venue. Some sound engineers clearly believe in this approach. One thing is that the only "mic bleed" is between the two stereo microphones where-as with multi-mic'd stages with "sections" the mic bleed would be all over the place. The human brain seems quite sensitive to reverberations as these, since the more primal purpose of the hearing system is to determine the direction of sound sources - to know where to look and in which direction to run. But, to end that point with a stereo two-mic recording the mic bleed is a feature (stereophonics) and not a bug. :-)

What little I've studied on this is that the "you're there" sense of realism is about time delays and information between both ears. A few guys on here dared us all to put one speaker (mono) in the middle of our listening rooms and give it a go... interesting. Perhaps that might tell us what our rooms are doing WRONG, because any artifacts could be construed as being room generated unless the speaker is some time-domain abomination with bizarre polar and power response.

Binaural is really a cool experiment, but I never did take the bait and get into it and try the HRTF equalization required. Minimalist dual-mic stereo recordings get mixed reviews - I'd like to see how often this technique is used. On the other end, I dabbled in room correct for a few years but I always thought the better of the two compromises was "room correction off".


With something as basic as some panning, a sound engineer can make a real convincing artifact! The point is... are we having fun? If we're having fun, then it doesn't matter I suppose. :-)

Cheers,
Presto


Edits: 06/08/25 06/08/25 06/08/25
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