OK, this slightly simplified version is going out tomorrow. More compact, less to fight. This loses the 'dual' part of the MS, the rear channel.
Cool. Have fun with it.
I'd love to try an alternate version of that using the same mics, but with the two shotguns in X/Y PAS and the Mid of the MS pair facing rearward.
..with three things in mind:
First, it's a test of the X/Y PAS shotgun thing for all the reasons mentioned above.
Second, it retains ambient/room/audience rear facing pickup in an overall arrangement of six channels in total. The presence of which may make elimination of the forward facing MS pair more palatable.
And third, it retains the fig-8 Side mic. I find that channel adds something compelling even when I don't or can't do a proper MS>LR conversion of the center pair (using the Zoom F8 for direct playback, as we've discussed elsewhere with regards to that F8 monitoring quirk) and simply bring up some of it in the OMT mix without any polarity inversion to the right channel. It's part glue, part tonal. Although that be more attributable to my particular setup using the 5 near-spaced miniature DPA supercards in the middle.
Thank you very much for the explanation. I don't have a lot of practical experience. Sometimes happened, when I used xy cards and spaced omnis, that I had to use very little of omni in the final mix. I think it was because bad acoustic in the room. More clean and dry xy signal would be useful. It would allow me to add more omni in the mix.
On the other hand, when I was taping in great acoustic room, unfortunately that is not often, I didn't use much of xy.
Makes sense, and is perfectly okay. That you arrived at such a different balance between the two in different scenarios can be interpreted as exercising the powerful flexibility the arrangement provides.
I have never experience big hole in the stereo omni track of the audience PA recording.
Two things here:
I realize that it may not be practical to do so, but try spacing them further apart if you are able to. If you do get a detectable center in the middle, the X/Y center pair will fill it, while the wider spacing will let the omnis do the wide-omni thing even better and any detectable hole arguably allows the X/Y pair to do its center-thing better in combination.
This is one of the things that makes taper recording of PAs an oddity in the recording world. Even huge 30 to 50 foot omni spacings can sometimes work. Even though the stereo distribution of non-PA sounds are likely to pull strongly into either speaker with a big hole in the middle, monophonic PA content will be centered and not have a hole as long as the distance from the PA speakers on each side to the microphone location on each side is the same (identical content in both sides of the PA remains phase correlated at both microphones), while stereo pickup of any differential stereo stuff thru the PA such as stereo verbs, effects, maybe drum panning, is maximized using time-of-arrival differences from the widely spaced omnis (rather than via directionality of X/Y shotguns). Truly diffuse non-direct sound such as venue reverberance and non-specific audience reaction is be completely decorrelated between channels to even the lowest frequencies due to the very large distance between microphones, making those recordings sound really big, open, and enveloping.