Fascinating MS
"Gary Eickmeier" writes:
-snip-
Additionally, it seems that MS is able to encode direction more accurately
and finely than any other miking technique or scheme. I have tried. The
You haven't tried 50 cm A/B with diffraction spheres, then (or perhaps the Jeklin
disk, which I have not tried).
MS has okay L-to-R imaging. But sometimes the LR soundstage "dimension" can be
non-linear the further left or right you go. That is, you can have a somewhat
clustered "centerish" soundstage that then suddenly zips out to far left and far
right. Farther center left and farther center right can kinda be skipped over to
jump directly to that far left and or right. Doesn't happen all the time, but it
can.
Aside from not having a reliably accurate left-to-right, my main complaint with MS
and XY is the lack of true, pin-point, *front-to-back* imaging. That's why I largely
abandoned MS when I heard 50cm A/B. That, and the ability to use omnis which,
because of their much better low end response and more even response in general,
brought on a whole new world of realism, particularly with orchestral work.
ability to adjust the stage width afterward is a bonus that shouldn't be
discounted.
Typically, you don't want to do that with A/B because that's where the "room width"
lives, and rarely is your "subject" as wide as the left and right walls. But if you
want you can trim in the pan pots a touch to narrow the image and you'll do no harm.
Along with that, I am wondering what the Stereo Width Control is doing in
Audition is doing exactly - is it converting a normal stereo signal to MS
and back again? Or is it just extracting some middle and making the
difference signal greater?
Several plug-ins have a width enhancer. Generally that's done by crossfeeding delay
components or similar time-based trickery. Indeed it's handy -- if not overused.
Now, there are some mastering processors that convert to and from a pseudo MS so
that you can then raise or lower the center of the image, but I'm not sure it's
truly MS. For one thing, as I understand these (have not used one), you do not
change the width as you adjust the "center" volume. YMMV.
Frank
Mobile Audio
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