Hoping not to offend, but this question can't possibly have a single "right answer" that's valid for everyone, or even for one person in all recording situations. That's why the different types of capsule exist: free-field, diffuse-field, in between, and "to infinity and beyond!" Schoeps offers four different single-pattern omni capsule types for some very good reasons:
- Room acoustics vary a lot (their reverberance and high-frequency absorption are especially relevant);
- Miking distances vary a lot (thus varying the mix of direct and reverberant sound energy that you pick up); and last but in no way least,
- Different people listen differently, hear differently and want different qualities from a recording.
If you want a bit of the technical background of what the four different single-pattern Schoeps omni capsules are about, with charts and graphs and everything, you could conceivably look on
http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/m/6430/1450/#msg_4867. That's a board where I no longer post, though back in the day, I put a lot of time and energy into it. (Oh, well.) Or, you know, you
could look at Schoeps's Web site (
www.schoeps.de)--but I don't think they have a page that actually
compares the capsules, unfortunately.
I have two different pairs of Schoeps omni capsules; they happen to be the MK 2 and MK 2S, but I record mostly classical music and my whole point here is that YM not only MV, but almost certainly
W (=will) V. Anyway, I don't use the MK 2 very often at all. Each time I've used them, musicians have gone out of their way to tell me that they loved the recording; several have said it was the first time they'd ever heard a recording that "sounded like them."
So why don't I use them all the time? It's because if the hall is any "good" (if it has a pleasant reverberant quality that goes well with the type of music being performed) and if I can physically put my mikes up where I want to, I'd usually rather mike from farther away. That gives a mix of direct and reflected sound, and for reasons of physics--which I won't go into here, mainly because I still remember being beaten up in public school for knowing stuff like this--a free-field capsule such as the MK 2 would sound a little rolled-off on top. The MK 2H or MK 2S would be much more likely to "sound right" at such distances (or at an extreme distance, the MK 3--but I wouldn't normally want to record from that far away).
As a classical engineer I'm a bit of an outsider here--fortunately, I feel that I'm among people who treat outsiders well. Anyway, the music that "you people" mostly record is different from the music that I mostly record, but the physics is the same. Whenever you record indoors you get room reflections, with some degree of high-frequency energy absorption on every bounce. You rarely record where direct sound is the dominant element, and where the high frequencies in the sound haven't been subject to much room absorption.
On the other hand, the sound you do record is often miked and mixed and amplified. In the process, all kinds of EQ is applied both directly by the sound mixer on the board, and indirectly because the microphones and PA speakers are far from flat. Those are factors that I don't usually have to contend with, so I don't know exactly what advice to give--except to remember that, in this case even more than most others, not only
will your mileage vary, but that logically it
should vary for reasons of physics. If you're listening to anyone else's recordings made with omni mikes, please be aware that you (or they) would never get similar results with the same microphones, unless the room acoustics
and miking distances were similar to begin with. You're not just hearing the sound of the mikes; you're hearing the whole goulash of performers, P.A. equipment, room, miking configuration AND microphones.
--best regards
Topic: Advice: Which omni cap for Schoeps CMC6? (Read 3645 times)