I ‘think’ that to get the pattern’s full sound, the rear lobe of any super/hyper should not be blocked/baffled
Anything in close proximity to the microphone can effect pattern and response, particularly if its near or blocks the front or rear vents. The larger the object is the greater its influence, and the closer the object is the greater its influence.
Ideally, unless intentionally using a baffle as part of the recording technique, one shouldn't have anything in close proximity to the microphones, but practically we need to mount them somehow, and when worn, a large object in close proximity is impossible to get away from. When head worn, the head may or may not be leveraged as an intentional baffle. It certainly is used intentionally for HRTF "dummy head" like setups. Worn in a hat as discussed above, the arrangement is no longer HTRF dummy head like (both mics are out in front of the baffle, rather than on either side of it), but the head still acts as a baffle to the rear which may provide some useful sensitivity attenuation for sounds arriving from directly behind. In any case, best to avoid blocking the sound path to both the front and rear vents as much as possible.
I've wondered how much of the sound of a supercard is related to the tightness of its pattern and how much is related to its small rear lobe. That would be a good comp to make with a higher-order ambisonic microphone. At a high enough order, one can retain a very similar front pattern to a first-order supercardioid but without any appreciable rear lobe. I'd very much like to hear that. It may be the collective front and back lobe in combination (with inverted polarity) that produces the sound of the supercard that we are familiar with, more than just the 1st order pattern shape.
A friend once ran 41V’s vertically, but backwards on a stand (red dots aiming wrong directions). I think that the recording was still listenable, but not what it could have been.
I run a pair of rear facing DPA supercards as a regular part of my multimicrophone array. Its really interesting to listen to that pair in isolation, and compare it to the isolated forward facing microphones. So much of the sound we end up recording is the diffuse/reverberant sound filling the room, that even intentionally using supercards in that way to maximally reduce the sensitivity of that pair to sound arriving from the front hemisphere doesn't do as much as one might think to "eliminate the sound arriving from the front".
Regardless of how the microphones are oriented, when listened to in isolation we end up getting more similar sounding content in each of them than many folks probably realize.
Topic: Schoeps MK41 vs MK41V (Read 7782 times)