I went DIN-A instead of DIN or ORTF in an effort to get more hall sound while still being that close. If we were just recording there rather than doing a live concert, I would have preferred to be more towards the middle of the church. I'm not sure if my interpretation of Stereophonic Zoom is correct as far as that goes, but if I have understood correctly DIN-A would give me the widest SRA of those 3 setups.
Widest in the sense of the distribution of sound sources between the speakers. If located in the same spot, what will change most between those setups is the playback stereo imaging, not so much the amout of hall sound on the recording. Actually ORTF will pickup slightly more room sound due to the wider angle between mics, but to change the direct/reverberant balance significantly you'd need to move closer/farther-away or more radically change the angle between microphones and perhaps the pickup pattern.
Hmm, I guess I need to go study the SZ paper again. I was under the assumption that ORTF would actually pickup
less room sound becuase while the mic angle is widest of the 3 arrangements, its SRA is narrowest. This is the part of the SZ paper that took me the longest to wrap my head around, and maybe I still don't quite get it.
My main concern during setup was making sure the entire group was within the range of the SRA. Moving my stand farther back was not an option, unfortunately. When I measured angles from the mic position, the outer singers of the ensemble would have been outside the SRA of ORTF (96 deg for cards). We were just within the SRA boundaries for DIN, so I chose DIN-A to give me some breathing room in covering everyone and hopefully capturing some more of the room sound also. Was my OCD measuring of angles unnecessary?
BTW, this is the app I used to measure the angles quickly with my phone:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appyhand.bearingcompassYou rotate into landscape mode and then you are looking at your camera with a horizontal compass bearing overlay on the screen. I took a bearing of straight ahead from the mic position, then pivoted left and right to the edges of the group and noted the bearings of those points also and then added / subtracted from the original bearing to come up with the width of the group as seen from the mic position. I must have tried about 10 different apps before I found one that did this.