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Originally Posted by David Rick  .....
I agree. Consequently, I'm more than a little puzzled by a system like the Schoeps/Bruck KFM 360 in which, while the left/right cues are based on time and shadowing, the front/rear cues are generated by what's basically a pair of rotated M/S mics, i.e. the coincident microphone equivalent of a pan pot!
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Exactly!
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Similarly, though I've been quite an advocate of the Williams stereo array charts on this forum, to apply a time/intensity trading curve developed for the front listening quadrant to the sides and a widely spread rear seems completely unjustified. So I maybe it doesn't surprise me that my few experiments with Williams / Le Du five-microphone arrays have had pretty mixed results.
OTOH, do we even need accurate panning behind the listener? I don't really think so. If one's mix layout is "band front / hall rear" as is true of nearly all classical productions, who the heck cares exactly where various lateral sound reflections come from? The only important thing is that they're lateral.
Increasingly, I'm tending to think of location surround recording as two distinct problems: recording the musicians and recording the room. In recording the musicians, I care a lot about localization. In recording the room, I don't. What I do care about is keeping as much direct stage sound as possible out of the surround feeds, because it tends to mess up the front imaging.
Some pop mixers do the opposite. They'll put the lead vocal into Ls and Rs too. Comments?
David L. Rick
Seventh String Recording
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I had an interesting experience in a cinema theatre recently. The lead actors were having a converstation and I was observing the phantom sound imaging with some confusion.
Usually (or perhaps often) the main dialogue in films is centered (or even mono) in the stereo mix and localises at almost the same distance as the screen.
On this occasion I was very puzzled by the localisation cues, since the sound didn't appear to be exactly localised at the screen distance as usual.
After a moment or two I noticed that the balance engineer for this particular film had sent the dialogue to the side/rear speakers almost equally, which gave a sense of a vaguely non-localised sound source .... very strange.... which presumably came from a confusion of differing cues from the many speakers in the auditorium.
Andy