Nah, that just means they aren't being done particularly well. Often those recordings are an example of the sound from the back of the venue where a stand is allowed or can be more easily managed - well behind the impact zone up front, surrounded by a less enthusiastic audience, with a different direct/reverberant situation calling for different mic configs than closer up front. But those issues have nothing to do with recording from a microphone stand (a stealth recording made from the base of the stand would likely be far inferior), rather it's right back to the top slot on my hierarchical list: recording location. Just because the mics are attached to a stand doesn't automatically damn the recording, if anything that allows for a better recording. It makes producing a great recording easier in many ways, the most common issue with it purely from a technical point of view is that we are not often able to place that stand were it would make the best recording.
I'm just talking the technical stuff here, and not addressing any of the social/cultural baggage of open stand taping verses stealth. I know you feel strongly about that, but it's really an entirely separate issue.
All this is totally situation dependant. For some things I can make far better stealth recordings than I could using a stand, and for others the exact opposite is true.
hence the use of the word "mostly"...I have heard good, if not great mic stand recordings, but as you said, they're not "from the back of the room" ones, they're when the taper was able to set up a foot or two from the PA and almost put the mics in the cone. nice, fat, crunchy, etc.....
I'll just never understand why tapers would go the 'safe' route and limit themselves to less than 1% of a rooms spatial area (especially when the 'sweet spot' is in front of the board 99% of the time)...sure, it's convenient, but I don't tape for convenience, I tape to capture the best sounding recording possible.
to me, those mic stand recordings often sound hollow. and I'm not talking about matrix-style, which is an entirely different talk show.
back to the AT's, I pretty much collected the entire Crowes '96 tour, a band that has a full range of sound, and the guy who taped 5 shows with his AT's, they were listened to seldom for the reasons I explained. but they weren't the ones in the link previous, they were actual 'microphones', not the tiny ones that were in the pic. there was also another taper who taped a lot of bands with AT's (I don't have the specific model here, it's on the tape cases, which are buried right now), and when I'd playback and look at the EQ flat, the spectrum was like that of a giant pyramid....LOTS of midrange, but lacking on both the left and the right. again, persononal preference. was never big on Schoeps either. Geffel's sounded pretty nice, and there was one other mic-stand taper who did some excellent, non-jamband pulls with a micstand, I think it was Kurt V, who no longer tapes.
for me, it's more the 'trouble/setup/teardown' of micstands...if they sounded "twice as good", to justify the expense, I'd have went that way long ago.
instead, they rarely sound 10% better, which makes stealth an easy choice for moi.
Topic: Trying to get into taping, have some general questions (Read 11594 times)