Hi. Let me try to save you some time and money here. I do legitimate, professional recording of opera and can tell you that stealth (or other technically casual) recording of opera is generally a hopeless cause. Much if not most of the time, you won't hear the voices clearly enough to make the recording worth listening to, except as a vague souvenir of an evening.
I do a lot of stealth recordings, mostly of opera. I've used a Tascam for a while with internal mics, which provided decent, listenable but not high quality recordings. I decided I wanted to upgrade and, in doing some research, stumbled across this thread on the site (while deciding that probably the M10 + external mics would be the best option).
Anyway, I doubt anyone was losing any sleep over this issue, but I thought I'd throw my two cents in. No, if you're sitting two rows back in the orchestra, using a recording device, it's not going to sound like a radio broadcast. But that's obvious, and I don't think anyone is oblivious to that fact when they do that.
I'm a huge opera fan, and I have thousands of recordings. Of those, maybe four or five are studio recordings. The rest are live performances, probably around 70% radio broadcast and about 30% stealth/in-house recordings, of quality ranging from horrible to is-that-really-from-someone's-pocket?-it-sounds-perfect.
There are several distinct advantages to doing stealth recordings of classical music, particularly opera. If you hate opera this probably will seem like splitting hairs, but if you really love it you'll know what I mean.
1) vocal size/quality. On live broadcasts, the mics are on stage and are so close up that you can't tell a lot of things about the singers. When companies hold auditions, a lot of times if it is done in the actual opera house the people listening will sit in the middle or back of the theater. Why? because they want to hear how big the voice is, how it carries, and, very important, squillo. These are all things that you can't tell from five feet away. But if you are sitting in the back, you can tell in a heartbeat. Vocal squillo is a bit more difficult to pick up on the microphones no matter where you're sitting, but believe me, the difference between the sound from up close to the sound from in the back of the house can be immense. And with stealth recordings, you get that feeling much better, because you can hear how small/big/bright/dull voices are much better than just listening over the radio.
2) the availability of opera broadcasts is not that high. First of all, the vast majority of opera companies in the world never do ANY radio broadcasts, so it's a bit of a strawman to say radio broadcasts are better than stealth recordings, because.... what if you want a given performance recorded and it is never going to broadcast it in the first place? Well, tough luck. In that case your only option is an in-house recording. On top of THAT, a lot of companies that DO broadcast actually DELAY their broadcasts, and record from a series of performances and then splice together based on what they think sounds good. So you might not even be getting a single, discrete performance, but instead a little from Monday night, some from Thursday night, a couple of arias from Saturday's matinee, etc.
3) the unpredictability of opera. If a given company does a production of, say, Rigoletto, and they have 10 performances over a few months, it's entirely possible they will have multiple casts, could happen that someone gets sick and some new talent steps in and saves the day. If it's not being broadcast, you missed it. But if you're there in the house, you could be part of history, and have it all in a nice, convenient WAV file to play back once you get home...
Anyway. That's the motivation behind it. Now I'll go invest in my M10 to take care of the practical side of it.
Topic: The best equipment for opera/chamber music? Should I use balanced cables? (Read 9719 times)