X/Y with super- to- hyper-cardioids (I doubt that many people here have actual hypercardioids; they're very rare) can give you better depth and spaciousness than X/Y with cardioids. I suspect that a lot of people haven't tried angling them apart far enough to get there. It seems wrong visually, if you think of the mikes as having narrow pickup patterns, so you have to put more faith in your ears and/or in the math that says to set them farther apart, either in angle or distance or a combination of both.
But also, many--probably most--microphones with directivity greater than cardioid are designed primarily for speech pickup and P.A. applications, and are lacking on the low-frequency end to begin with. That would be OK (we could all avoid those types of mike) if frequency response graphs were designed to show the low-frequency response for distant sound sources. But in practice they're usually not, and that makes it hard to know what you're getting.
Most published frequency response curves are plotted at an "equivalent measuring distance" of only one meter. At that distance a directional microphone will already have audible proximity effect--so the graph shows stronger bass response than the microphone will actually deliver for more distant sound sources. And proximity effect is greater when the pressure-gradient response of the microphone is a larger proportion of how it works, i.e. as you go from omni through the cardioid to the figure-8 end of the spectrum (super- and hyper-cardioids being closer to the pure pressure-gradient end of that line). So if you're used to the way a certain manufacturer's graphs look for (say) their cardioids, you can easily be fooled when looking at their graphs for supercardioids or figure-8s.
Making that situation even worse, one prominent, very high-quality manufacturer uses only about a one-foot equivalent measuring distance. Thus their supercardioids (they don't make figure-8s to my knowledge) appear on paper to have adequate low-frequency response, but there's a really large discrepancy between what the same manufacturer shows for their omni (pressure) microphones (their original product area) and their more directional microphones. Another very high-quality manufacturer uses something like half a meter. That may correspond to the way they intend their microphones to be used, but it can be very deceptive for customers who want more general-purpose music recording microphones.
So as a method of self-defense, always pay close attention to the applications that the manufacturer suggests or shows for their more directional microphones. If the catalog photos show a directional microphone being used close up--as a solo performer's microphone, or as part of a P.A. system--chances are strong that its response is tailored for that application. That will make it tend to be rather thin sounding, for the kind of distant/semi-distant music recording that most of us do.
--best regards
Topic: hyper cards in X/Y configuration? (Read 4040 times)