How close is the "close" in "close miking"? Yes, I might think of one meter or thereabouts--but sometimes half of that or even less. When you're trying to pick up one direct source of sound in the presence of other sound sources, or to get an exaggerated clarity for one sound source, you'd use that approach.
My main concerns when choosing a microphone setup are the degree of clarity ("focus") and color that I can get, and the kind of "stereo image" I can get, when the recording is played back over a stereo pair of loudspeakers. With good cardioids you can get clear, colorful sound and also a clear, stable "stereo image"--one that lets the listener hear more or less where each individual sound source originally was, and that fills the "sound stage" between the speakers to whatever degree you prefer. Good cardioids can satisfy both appetites pretty well if they're in the right place.
If you want more color you can veer toward omni (using "wide cardioids" for example), or if you want more focus and precision of imaging you can veer in the opposite direction (e.g. supercardioids). The choice of pattern is part of your balancing act as an engineer. Sometimes it's even appropriate to go all the way to using a pair of omnis or of figure-8s, though I don't do so often.
When you use a pair of microphones for overall stereo recording, and those mikes are set up with a certain angle and distance between them and have a certain directional pattern, then there will be a predictable, definite relationship between the left-to-right distribution of the sound sources in the live event and what will seem to be their distribution in the playback over loudspeakers.
Different kinds of music have various "recording idioms" with them; these are more or less a matter of tradition and expectation derived from people's shared listening experience over decades. For example, it's possible to make stereo recordings so that the instruments or voices appear to be coming right out of your loudspeakers. That sounds fine for a few kinds of music but not most others. So that's something that we're all more or less aware of--maybe not always on a conscious level when we're just enjoying a recording as listeners, but as engineers it helps to be conscious of it.
And I'm just saying that a coincident pair of cardioids angled at 90° is at one extreme of the useful spectrum--a setup that's mainly good at picking up an extremely wide arc of direct sound sources, such as an entire semicircle around the mike. But when you record a concert from a position in the audience, the entire stage width is much less than 180° so in playback, all the direct sound sources tend to sound as if they're coming from center or nearly so.
It's a bold statement to manufacture a microphone like the NT 4, but bold statements can be based on careful reasoning--or they can be based on acting as if you're sure of something whether you have evidence for it or not. This particular "microphone geometry" does have its uses, but they are somewhat specialized and you need to determine how well they match your needs, is all I'm saying.
--best regards
Topic: Is it worth moving from Rode SVM to Rode NT4? (Read 6508 times)