Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #81   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Audio Empire Audio Empire is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,193
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

On Sun, 15 May 2011 10:34:11 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

You absolutely need the center mike if you are using widely-spaced omnis,
if
for no other reason than to avoid an obvious hole-in-the-middle effect.
You
only need a center speaker if you have a three channel playback (such as
some
releases of Mercury and RCA Red Seal 3- channel recordings on SACD. But,
then
you need three amps and three preferably identical speakers.


Step back a minute on that one. I have found that some speaker/room
combinations exhibit the dreaded hole in the middle, or stretched soloists,
due to some reasons I give in my paper, but the idea is that if you screw up
the speaker placement you can have two "clumps" of sound at the right and
left, with no solid center that is well focused. A center speaker eliminates
most of that problem. Obviously.


But that's another story. Of course, people with poorly set-up playback
systems (like speakers in corners on the opposite sides of the room from one
another) can create problems that don't exist on the recording itself, but
that has nothing to do with the competence of the recording. The playback end
can be so incompetently set up, or in a room with such bad acoustics that the
best recording in the world will sound lousy.

I used to know a recordist who had his speakers set up as I describe, above.
To "compensate" for the fact that his speakers were 12 ft apart, he would
turn the pan-pots on mixer to 10 and 2 O'clock respectively. ON his playback
system, they sounded fine, on a properly set up speaker system, they might
as well have been mono. I could never convince him that this was "wrong
thinking". One records properly by using full separation, not by optimizing
the pickup for a single flawed playback setup.


Well, joy of joys, I just happened to make a single point stereo mike
recording at the same time, for backup and/or comparison. Haven't even
downloaded it yet, the first one took so much time and was so successful.
Maybe could make a special test recording where i fade between the two
techniques and see what happens.


If you did the latter correctly, you'll find that it produces a superior
stereo.


I cannot say that the single point stereo mike was perfectly placed, no. So
the comparison won't be real fair, but it was there for backup, so I might
learn something from it anyway.

Just tell us which recordings are yours, and we may own them already.
What
is your name?


I didn't say that they are commercial recordings. I was the archival
recordist for a famous symphony orchestra for many years, Most of the Jazz
stuff I recorded was for a National Public Radio Network series called
"Jazz
Alive" as well as having recorded the entire San Francisco Jazz Festival
for
three years running. Most of my recordings these days are for civic
musical
groups and institutions like the Stanford University Jazz Band, The
Stanford
Winds, and the Stanford Symphony, plus countless jazz groups who want
their
performances preserved. Some of these things I was paid for doing, and
some I
did just for my own amusement.


I would love to hear something, if you can make a disc or upload something.


Send me an e-mail with your address. I think that I can send you
something....

Read your blog - very complete and good. I may still have a few questions,
because I have just gotten serious about audio recording and have the
equipment now to do some innocent experiments. There is nothing like hands
on experience. (I have been a video professional for 20 years now, after Air
Force retirement.) My degree is Industrial Design.

Gary Eickmeier


Glad you enjoyed it, Gary.

  #82   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Gary Eickmeier Gary Eickmeier is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,449
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

I currently use a single-point stereo mike for much of my recording these
days where one mike head rotates with respect to the other (Avantone
CK-40)

http://avantoneaudio.com//ck40.htm

I use it in an A-B configuration either in the cardioid mode or (depending
upon the situation) crossed figure-of-eight. Lately I have put together a
isolation matrix that allows me to do M-S (one mike in cardioid pattern,
facing the ensemble, and the other mike at 90 degrees to the front
"firing"
cardioid and set to the figure-of-eight pattern. The Front + Side and
Front
- Side matrixing is done in the mixer (it takes three mike channels to do
this, but the results are worth the extra mixer input).

The mike sounds excellent and easily betters my Sony C-500s.


Have you found that this configuration can seem to encode a surround sound
feeling when played thru a Dolby surround type decoder? I think it depends
on the rear sound being out of phase and front center being in phase, and
then all angles in between come out where they belong.

In Toole's new book, he made an extremely interesting observation about
coincident miking. He described an experiment wherein the Ambisonics
Soundfield microphone, which I believe is the world's most coincident
microphone, when played back anechoically produced IHL - in-head
locatedness, rather than a surround effect. To me, that means that playback
depends on the real acoustic space of the room to develop directional
perception. The direct sound is not enough.

Take from this what you will and talk amongst yourselves....

Gary Eickmeier


  #83   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Audio Empire Audio Empire is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,193
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

On Sun, 15 May 2011 18:25:33 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

I currently use a single-point stereo mike for much of my recording these
days where one mike head rotates with respect to the other (Avantone
CK-40)

http://avantoneaudio.com//ck40.htm

I use it in an A-B configuration either in the cardioid mode or (depending
upon the situation) crossed figure-of-eight. Lately I have put together a
isolation matrix that allows me to do M-S (one mike in cardioid pattern,
facing the ensemble, and the other mike at 90 degrees to the front
"firing"
cardioid and set to the figure-of-eight pattern. The Front + Side and
Front
- Side matrixing is done in the mixer (it takes three mike channels to do
this, but the results are worth the extra mixer input).

The mike sounds excellent and easily betters my Sony C-500s.


Have you found that this configuration can seem to encode a surround sound
feeling when played thru a Dolby surround type decoder?


It might, but I'm strictly a two-channel guy. It's hard enough (in my
estimation) to get two-channels "right" to waste any of my energy on
surround, but that's MY taste. If I had any clients clamoring for surround, I
might give it a whirl, but so far nobody's asked. I have Dolby surround on my
home theater setup, of course, but that's in another room.

I think it depends
on the rear sound being out of phase and front center being in phase, and
then all angles in between come out where they belong.


Were I to try that, I would set the "M" mike in omni or even figure-of-eight
pattern to pick up more of the room acoustic. Of course, that's not really
practical in a club or concert hall where people (other than the musicians
and recording personnel) are present.

In Toole's new book, he made an extremely interesting observation about
coincident miking. He described an experiment wherein the Ambisonics
Soundfield microphone, which I believe is the world's most coincident
microphone, when played back anechoically produced IHL - in-head
locatedness, rather than a surround effect. To me, that means that playback
depends on the real acoustic space of the room to develop directional
perception. The direct sound is not enough.


An Ambisonics mike is NOT in any way a simple coincident pair. It consists of
4 super or hyper-cardioid mikes arranged in a closely spaced tetrahedron and
marked W. X, Y, Z. and all are pointed in a direction tangental to the sides
of the tetrahedron. The system requires a "UHJ" encoder to matrix the 4 mikes
to create al LF, RF, LR and RR "channel" and might indeed sound as if you,
the listener had that tetrahedron inside your head, because obviously it
requires room reflections to work WITHOUT a UHJ decoder. Did Toole say
anything about the differences between the recording played with and without
a decoder in an anechoic chamber?

Take from this what you will and talk amongst yourselves....

Gary Eickmeier




  #84   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Arny Krueger Arny Krueger is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 17,262
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

"Gary Eickmeier" wrote in
message
PHOOEY!

You don't want to make stereo recordings with a
coincident mike! Stereo operates on a macroscopic scale,
not "at the head" of the listener. This being the case,
if the images are formed in the room from speakers
located with substantial geometric similarity to the live
instruments, you may want to place the microphones near
those instruments.


I just finished an experimental recording to help prove
my ideas on the recording end. I had always used the
convenient single point stereo microphones for video work
or concert recording. But there wasn't a very
satisfactory stereo effect from them, because they are
placed at only the one point in the room.


There is a hidden agenda in recording, and that is what our mutual friend
Dave Clark calls "Dereverberation".

Dereverberation is something that our perceptual system does for us all of
the time and in such a way that we are usually uncconscious of it. It is a
way to identify what some call "the cocktail party effect". It is a subject
of significant amounts of research at this time because of how pervasively
it affects communcations systems.

The basic idea is that for whatever reason, our perceptual system tends to
remove or attenuates the acoustics of the room that we are listening in.
The inherent problem with recording is that our recording systems don't
dereverberate like our ears do. So, our recordings can't be very effective
at delivering that "you are there" experience.

In a way, our ears do their part. They dereverberate our listening rooms
which facilitate us hearing through our listening rooms to hear the acoustic
of the room the musical performance happened in. However, we currently have
no way to make a properly dereverberated recording.

My theory sez that Telarc was right in using three spaced
omnis up front, spread across the soundstage. I have my
own ideas about positioning them, so I needed to get a
multichannel recorder and several omni mikes to try it
out. I bought the Zoom R16 eight track digital recorder.
I already had several of the cheap little Sony lavalier
condenser mikes that we use for video, so that is what I
used. Positioned them about 8 feet apart at center, half
left, and half right and as far as I could comfortably
get, about 6 feet, from the front row of players.


Since you have enough channels, it seems to me that you should make both
spaced and coincident recordings at the same time. I don't know which lav
mics you have, so I don't know how they shape up as good vehicles for
experimentation.

A transfer to Audition, a little EQ, a mixdown to stereo
(for now), and the result was so fantastic I was sitting
there crying like a baby it worked so well. Spacious,
even imaging all across the soundstage, great dept
imaging, pinpoint when there was a solo, just
spectacular.


One key component of any investigation is comparisons between different
approaches to the same problem.

Maybe I can take the moderators' advice and upload some
files with Usendit and post a link.


The way that people solve this problem is that they obtain some public space
on the web, and post a link to it. There are many sources of public file
space. For example, Comcast provides me with 1 GB of file space to load and
reveal to the public at will. There are also third party suppliers of this
kind of space, many who provide a fair amount of public file space at no
out-of-pocket charge. Please search google for file sharing.

Just too bad you
can't hear it on my system.


If you are going do something with general interest, it has to sound at
least acceptable on people's current systems.

The core of the problem is not just the reproduction, it is also in the
recording.


  #85   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Arny Krueger Arny Krueger is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 17,262
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

"Sebastian Kaliszewski"
wrote in message

Well, not. When you EQ a speaker (esp. multi driver one)
radiation pattern changes as well (partly due phase
changes, but not only due to them).


To clarify:

Depends what you eq. If you eq the signal paths to individual drivers, then
you can definately cause changes in the speaker's radiation pattern.

If you eq the whole system, that is eq the input to the speaker system,
then there are no changes to the speaker's radiation pattern as long as
there is only one speaker in the room. If you have two speakers in the room
and apply the same equalization to each of them, then it is far less likely
that there will be changes to the speaker's radiation pattern.




  #86   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Gary Eickmeier Gary Eickmeier is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,449
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

Were I to try that, I would set the "M" mike in omni or even
figure-of-eight
pattern to pick up more of the room acoustic. Of course, that's not really
practical in a club or concert hall where people (other than the musicians
and recording personnel) are present.


I am actually after hearing some audience in the recording. I have always
hated the way stereo folds back the audience into the stereo image, and have
been searching for a way to hear them back with me and behind me, like in
real life.


In Toole's new book, he made an extremely interesting observation about
coincident miking. He described an experiment wherein the Ambisonics
Soundfield microphone, which I believe is the world's most coincident
microphone, when played back anechoically produced IHL - in-head
locatedness, rather than a surround effect. To me, that means that
playback
depends on the real acoustic space of the room to develop directional
perception. The direct sound is not enough.


An Ambisonics mike is NOT in any way a simple coincident pair. It consists
of
4 super or hyper-cardioid mikes arranged in a closely spaced tetrahedron
and
marked W. X, Y, Z. and all are pointed in a direction tangental to the
sides
of the tetrahedron. The system requires a "UHJ" encoder to matrix the 4
mikes
to create al LF, RF, LR and RR "channel" and might indeed sound as if you,
the listener had that tetrahedron inside your head, because obviously it
requires room reflections to work WITHOUT a UHJ decoder. Did Toole say
anything about the differences between the recording played with and
without
a decoder in an anechoic chamber?


Yes of course. It is all on page 286. I can quote the final couple of
sentences:

(He first mentions that the system requires you to be at one point among the
speakers, and if you lean forward, back, right or left, the imaging biases
that way)

"All of this should be no surprise in a system in which the mathematical
solution applies only at a point in space, and then only if the setup is
absolutely precise in its geometry and the loudspeakers are closely matched
in both amplitude and phase response. Room reflections absolutely corrupt
the theory. So what did it sound like in the anechoic chamber? It sounded
like an enormous headphone; the sound was inside the head. When the setup
was moved to a nearby conventional listening room, the sound externalized,
and all previous comments apply."

This is an important piece of the puzzle for me, and indicates that I am
correct in saying that stereo in general should not work with the direct
sound alone. You are all familiar with how some setups with highly
directional speakers require you to be nailed to the sweet spot. If you go a
step in either direction, you will be listening in mono (to the speaker on
that side). A correct theory, or presentation, would permit you to wander
freely in the listening room, right, left, closer to the speakers or farther
away, and get a feeling very much like if you moved around at the live
event. This can be accomplished with a correct radiation pattern and speaker
positioning. And hey, not a lot of sound killing materials near the speaker
end, so that the reflected sound is of the same frequency response as the
direct.

Does some of that sound familiar, in a Linkwitz kinda way?

Gary Eickmeier


  #87   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Audio Empire Audio Empire is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,193
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

On Mon, 16 May 2011 06:54:03 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

Were I to try that, I would set the "M" mike in omni or even
figure-of-eight
pattern to pick up more of the room acoustic. Of course, that's not really
practical in a club or concert hall where people (other than the musicians
and recording personnel) are present.


I am actually after hearing some audience in the recording. I have always
hated the way stereo folds back the audience into the stereo image, and have
been searching for a way to hear them back with me and behind me, like in
real life.


In Toole's new book, he made an extremely interesting observation about
coincident miking. He described an experiment wherein the Ambisonics
Soundfield microphone, which I believe is the world's most coincident
microphone, when played back anechoically produced IHL - in-head
locatedness, rather than a surround effect. To me, that means that
playback
depends on the real acoustic space of the room to develop directional
perception. The direct sound is not enough.


An Ambisonics mike is NOT in any way a simple coincident pair. It consists
of
4 super or hyper-cardioid mikes arranged in a closely spaced tetrahedron
and
marked W. X, Y, Z. and all are pointed in a direction tangental to the
sides
of the tetrahedron. The system requires a "UHJ" encoder to matrix the 4
mikes
to create al LF, RF, LR and RR "channel" and might indeed sound as if you,
the listener had that tetrahedron inside your head, because obviously it
requires room reflections to work WITHOUT a UHJ decoder. Did Toole say
anything about the differences between the recording played with and
without
a decoder in an anechoic chamber?


Yes of course. It is all on page 286. I can quote the final couple of
sentences:



First of all, it's NOT a pair. It's four microphones, not two. Therefore it
has NOTHING to do with what we're discussing.


Gary Eickmeier




  #88   Report Post  
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
Audio Empire Audio Empire is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,193
Default Cable sound. Real after all?

On Mon, 16 May 2011 06:54:03 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

Were I to try that, I would set the "M" mike in omni or even
figure-of-eight
pattern to pick up more of the room acoustic. Of course, that's not really
practical in a club or concert hall where people (other than the musicians
and recording personnel) are present.


I am actually after hearing some audience in the recording. I have always
hated the way stereo folds back the audience into the stereo image, and have
been searching for a way to hear them back with me and behind me, like in
real life.


Believe me, even with a coincident pair, you'll hear MORE than enough of any
audience. But tastes vary. I want to hear to hear the musicians with as
little outside interference as possible.

Reply
Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules

Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
The damping factor and the sound of real music Andre Jute Vacuum Tubes 53 December 31st 07 05:38 PM
Sound cards real bandwidth katzenjammer Tech 4 November 10th 06 09:18 PM
how to make reverb sound real [email protected] Pro Audio 6 April 22nd 06 10:40 AM
Does this sound like a real acoustic piano ? DL Pro Audio 28 February 10th 06 01:13 AM


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 08:23 AM.

Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 AudioBanter.com.
The comments are property of their posters.
 

About Us

"It's about Audio and hi-fi"