Gary (slapping forehead--to be clear: mine, not yours), yes, I will own up to the green-clad paunch segment, fingers and badge. I hadn't noticed them there. (Busted.) If you'd shown my bald spot, I might have recognized myself sooner.
But enough about me. Gutbucket, the sound field generated by a large array of loudspeakers is peculiar -- it actually has things in common with an interference-tube ("shotgun") microphone, since there's generally increasing directivity of radiation at higher frequencies and a great deal of phase conflict, in this case from the multiple drivers operating in the same frequency range. The whole point is to push as much direct sound as possible as far back into the room as possible, in ways that acoustic instruments and human (or animal) voices can do only to a more limited extent. As a result, you can get mileage out of recording techniques that were originally developed for closer placement. How much mileage depends on circumstances that naturally vary tremendously among venues. So it's not entirely surprising that good sounding recordings can be made sometimes with equipment the choice of which can seem pretty random to someone who mainly records purely acoustic (e.g. classical) concerts.
If you're dedicated and you listen with an open mind to what you're doing, over time you can learn to make the best of almost any halfway reasonable setup. There's no good reason for anyone to be too parochial about How To Do This -- not that I'm saying anyone here is doing that, except maybe me from time to time. But even I try to limit myself to criticizing what I see as false concepts that could lead people into problem situations. A good recording still sounds good, even if I debunk someone's idea about how it got to be that way.
That said: People who record with small, omnidirectional condenser microphones have a range of good choices from quite inexpensive to quite expensive; the best sound best the most often, but good-sounding omnis can be found at all price levels. With cardioids it's somewhat less so--not necessarily because of the greater technical difficulty of producing them, but more because manufacturers are optimizing for different applications, especially communications (which calls for maximal speech intelligibility rather than musical sound quality) and also simply because most microphones are designed for a particular price point. Fortunately, most people here seem to realize that cardioids have many uses but aren't necessarily the center of the recording universe; they're problem-solvers.
But when you get to directional patterns beyond cardioid, it's quite different: There are whole levels of sound quality that simply aren't available from inexpensive gear. Unlike with omnis, there are no (say) $300 supercardioids that sound nearly as good on music (or even on speech, if you're a critical listener the way film sound people have to be) as the best professional supercardioids. Or figure-8s. And the same is even more true of shotgun microphones--that pavilion of the microphone zoo is a wild, wild mix.
Plus as with super- and/or hypercardioids, the features and qualities that make a particular shotgun mike tasty for dialog recording or voiceover work can very definitely undermine its goodness for music and vice versa. No manufacturer has ever offered shotgun microphones that were primarily designed for music recording or even to be "application agnostic" -- that would be a losing proposition. They're all made with dialog recording and other speech applications such as news reporting or voiceover work first and foremost in mind. A few of them can be considered for music recording if the circumstances call for it--but relying on them all the time would be accepting several unnecessary handicaps in my view.
Topic: Schoeps Shotgun Capsule: KMIT (Read 9618 times)