Happy to hear it worked well, and to your satisfaction! Thanks for the report, photos, and links. I'll try and give the recordings a listen tonight.
Curious about your thoughts on the rear-facing center center mic used the second night. Did you use any of that in the mix?
A couple of your comments struck me-
To my ear, the addition of a
near-spaced directional pair to the baseline OMT4 arrangement of omnis (or subcards) + center coincident pair does exactly as you say - it improves clarity.. and sort of provides a sense of greater proximity to the source. Almost a zoom-like effect, though more so in terms of clarity and perceptual closeness rather than in terms of imaging geometry. When adding that pair to a single forward facing mic in the center (say, going from OMT3 to OMT5), the resulting near-spaced triplet predominantly provides the sharp directional stereo information. My frequent suggestion to space that L/R pair twice as wide as one would ordinarily space a typical near-spaced stereo pair when used on its own is rooted in achieving the best integration of that stereo triplet - such that if the center mic is muted there will be a hint of hole in the middle, thereby providing room for the center mic content inhabit, but with the center mic unmuted the image hands off nicely from the left across the center to the right in a very smooth, stable and position accurate way. Such a 3-mic triplet is even more solid and stable and sharp imaging than a coincident center pair. I hear the most accurate image from an L/C/R pair in the center that is optimized like that.
Unfortunately, stretching that 2-ch near-spaced pair config to work best in combination with the center mic is somewhat inconvenient because the near-spaced pair needs to be either angled more widely (not desirable because it points them farther away from the PA) or spaced more widely, or a bit of both, making it less optimized for use as a stereo pair on its own. Also, angles narrower than +/-45° in the effort to get close to PAS require that pair to be very widely spaced, and its nice to keep the near-spaced pair from getting too close to the omnis. The use of pickup patterns that are highly-directional helps somewhat in allowing us to position and angle that pair somewhat less widely than we'd otherwise need to, and is what lead to my current arrangement of L/R supercards about 2' apart angled +/-45°, which is about as narrow as I feel I can make it while retaining good sharp imaging.
Another thing-
When adding the near-spaced L/R directional pair to a center coincident stereo pair (X/Y or M/S) rather than a single mic in the center (going to OMT6), there are now two pairs potentially contributing sharp directional stereo imaging cues across the center. Without making the near-spaced pair wider angled or spaced, they may be in conflict somewhat, which could be why you found night one more difficult to mix than night two. If you want to play around a bit with it, you might try summing the center X/Y hypercardioid pair to mono (which will produce something akin to a single forward facing cardioid) and see if that makes it easier to mix.
Its always very interesting to me to go back and forth between listening to omnis + center coincident pair, and omnis + center triplet. Both are good, but different. I do this pretty much every time. Most of the time I end up using both in the mix. I first establish a good balance within the triplet, getting that balanced with the omnis and whatever other channels, then use the Side channel of the M/S pair more as the "special sauce", rather than the primary source of forward directional imaging. The imaging is actually sharper without any Side channel, but it adds such a lovely sense of width, sparkling lushness and depth that its hard to leave it out. Sometimes I ride or automate its level - less when it gets really loud, energetic and dense (sharpening things up), more in the atmospheric parts and during good audience interaction segments when it really shines.
