Topic: Oops -- Omni and Figure 8, together

[vwmule]

At the Hot August Blues festival yesterday outside Baltimore I ran the LSD2 in my go-to format, Blumlein. Or I thought I did. Turns out the switch on capsule was omni, while the other was figure 8. I've essentially created a mid-side record, right? I was wondering why the right channel (omni) was running significantly lower than the left and regret not checking the switches.

So what do I do?

Also ran Milabs: http://www.archive.org/details/rrb2011-08-20&reCache=1

[DigiGal]

When recording the Mid Side components directly the following convention is used:

The Mid (ie: card, hyper, omni, shotgun) channel = the left channel of the recorder.

The Side (always a fig-8) channel = the right channel of the recorder.

Thus, it looks like you would need to swap channels then use a mid-side plug-in to create the desired stereo spread in post.

However, you may not actually have them reversed because the side (fig-8) channel most generally has a lower level compared to the mid channel.  This is normal because the mid channel is pointed at the center of the sound source and the side channel is picking up off-axis sound from the L-R sides of the room or hall (recording space).

Good luck, it may turn out to be a happy accident.

[vwmule]

Ah, I'll check again, maybe it was the Figure 8 on the right side.

[Gutbucket]

In identifying which is which, you should see more of a low frequency roll-off on the channel using the figure 8. 

Consider is that if you setup the mics for Blumlein, the Mid/Side array is rotated 45 degrees from away from the direction it should be pointed. The more Side you add the more you'll move towards two cardioids, one facing forwards 45 degrees to the left of right of center (which way depends on which cap was switched to omni) and the other one 180 degrees away from that, pointing to the opposite back corner.

Try various Mid/Side ratios including combinations you normally be less likely to use, like almost all Mid (slightly opening up the mono omni) or almost all Side (opposed hyper cardiods), both of which will have lots of cross-talk between channels.  If you have the inclination to mess around more deeply to get the best result you can, it might help to carefully EQ each side differently to compensate if the timbre differences between sides is a problem.. and to try different decoding ratios for each side, like closer to omni on the Left and hypercardiod facing forward on the Right or something like that.