Quote:
Originally Posted by boojum  ...
I have a borrowed Busman Blumlein ribbon, a Chinese mic modded by the US vendor. I tried it on the group's edge as one would for Blumlien and it was awful. Not knowing any better I just dropped the mic into the center of the group, right above the square table and it sounded the best of any array/technique I have yet used. So, what's wrong with this approach? |
Nothing wrong with it. Blumlein reverses phase for sources positioned towards the rear, so they appear in a stereo image on opposite sides than where they really were. As long as that's okay, if you like the result why not use it?
A soundfield-type ambisonic microphone, like our TetraMic or the mics from SoundField Ltd. will do the job better. You record four channels of audio information. The four channels capture essentially everything going on acoustically at that point in space. Those four channels of audio will never be used raw -- you must run them through a decode process in post-production (or during recording for use in monitoring).
In decode, you can set up whatever microphone setup you want. You can elect as many microphones as you want. You select each of the microphone's pickup pattern (omni, sub-card, card, super-card, hyper-card, figure-8 or anything in between). Each microphone can be aimed in whatever direction you choose in both horizontal and vertical (azimuth and elevation) planes. You can define Blumlein, X/Y, M/S, six hypercards and three cards, or pretty much whatever you want. And you can run as many decodes as you please, and then mix the results together.
So you can decode to a hyper card pointed at the guitar player, another aimed at the mandolin player, another at... (you get the idea). If the off-axis lobes are picking up audience noise, you can aim a cardioid's pattern null at the noise source and cut its level by 20+ dB.
It's unbelievably flexible.
And for what it's worth, our TetraMic is probably the finest Blumlein array in the world. Thanks to 12ax7 for mentioning it.
Len Moskowitz
Core Sound LLC
Core Sound