Zoom H6
On Tuesday, October 1, 2013 7:29:35 AM UTC-7, hank alrich wrote:
Gary Eickmeier wrote:
Thanks for the considered reply, but I am not a novice. I am a 30 year
member of the AES. I know you don't agree with my audio theories on
reproduction, and that will have to be until you understand what I am
talking about.
I am not likely to understand what you are talking about until you know
what you are talking about, and we're not getting close to that yet.
Being an AES member does not make one a recordist, or a mix engineer,
nor a mastering engineer.
This is the essence of your delusion. Reading the pamphlet is not the
same as doing the work.
Your comments reminded me of a guy I used to know. I was recording a well known, and well respected symphony orchestra with a world-renown conductor then. This guy (let's call him Bob) used to come back stage and watch me hang microphones, set up equipment, align and bias my (then) Otari 2-track/15ips MX-5050s, etc. while I was recording, he would sit next to me back-stage and write down everything I did! He'd make little drawings of all the switch and fader positions on my mixing console, ask me about things like the distance of my mikes from the stage, from the conductor, from the orchestra, etc. I wondered why. He didn't have the same TAPCO mixer I had, he didn't use Sony C-37p or C-500 microphones like I did. So, I wondered at the purpose of it all.
Now, Bob was eat-up with recording. It was his main hobby. He even bought a panel van to carry all of his gear and he recorded constantly. Anyway, after a number of years of recording this symphony, my REAL job started to require me to travel a lot and I could no longer count on being in town for the symphony performances. Bob begged me to recommend him to replace me. He had the gear and the enthusiasm, so I suggested to the symphony management that they hire him.
Occasionally, when I was in town, I would drop by the concert hall and hang-out with Bob. He used the exact-same microphone configurations that I used, except he used Neumann U-87s instead of Sony C-37Ps as his principle microphone pair and he had a Yamaha mixer, instead of a TAPCO. All fine and good. Then I noticed his pan-pot positions for the Neumanns. They were at 10:30 and 1:30 positions. Why? I asked him. His answer was that with the mikes panned fully left and right he got a "hole-in-the-middle". I couldn't imagine why this would be so until he invited me to his house. His speakers were located in the corners of his living room across the wide dimension of the room! They must have been 17 feet apart. He gave me a dub of one of the recordings and on my stereo, where the speakers were about 7 feel apart, there was essentially dead mono. After getting to know Bob a bit better, I realized that he had no "feel" for what he was doing. He copied what others did in similar situations, but he didn't understand the basics of recording and simply could not visualize microphone pickup patterns and he had no sense of how to properly use his microphones.
In other words, he had the experience (he recorded a lot), the equipment, and the enthusiasm. What he lacked was TALENT and therefore couldn't grasp what it was he was doing on almost any level. He couldn't understand, for instance, that pan-potting a stereo pair of mikes to fill-in the "hole-in-the-middle" of his playback speakers, ruined the recording for everybody. Talent is REQUIRED to be a successful recordist. Having the enthusiasm is wonderful, and all, but it's simply not enough. If you don't have the basic understanding of your tools and how to apply them, you'll never get anywhere.
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