Topic: MS Mix Question

[rowjimmytour]

I really do think the results are easier to mix if you peak at -6dB and it gives you plenty of head room. One nice thing about Sound Forge w/ the plugin is that you can hear the results on the fly and this allows me to come up w/ a mix pretty easily using give or take a 3/1 mix. Last show I did MS was totally acoustic stage lip and the crowd applause was louder then the music at times so it turned out to be more like 3/2 or maybe even closer to 50/50 then any other time I have ran MS. I think it all depends on the show but still for my money its best to match the MS as close as possible and peak at -6dB I think.
Peace

[DSatz]

china_rider, no, I don't actually have anything very wonderful worked out for this. For that matter my computer and my stereo system are in two different rooms and aren't connected in any way, so it gets awkward whenever I have to do any critical listening to stuff that's on the computer--I end up burning test CDs and running into the other room to play them. Also, while I described some tests that could be run to check out one's M/S software, I've never actually done them myself (yet). I'll get around to it some day.

I happen to use Sound Forge for most two-track editing simply because I know it best. I think Adobe Audition is probably a better program in most respects technically, and it has a nice M/S arrangement while Sound Forge has nothing built in for that. But it takes me a long time to really get to know a complex piece of software, and I've only had Audition for about two years, while I've been using various versions of Sound Forge for maybe eight or ten years now.

M/S is a nifty technique, but it's not actually my favorite way to record most music. It has essentially perfect mono/stereo compatibility plus the obvious ability to let you make certain decisions about image width and reverberance "after the fact"--but so do any other coincident setups (since you can always matrix any form of X/Y into sum and difference signals which in effect are M and S). For most non-commercial recordists mono compatibility simply isn't an issue, since they always listen in stereo anyway. It makes much more difference if you're doing film or video sound, or recording for radio (which I used to do quite a lot of).

With M/S recording I've always found that there's a pretty narrow range of M:S gain settings that give a plausible result. It's usually like--I turn the gain knob and find the center of that range, and I'm done; the other possible settings just don't seem all that useful. Double M/S shouldn't have that limitation nearly as much, but I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet.

--best regards

[SmokinJoe]

The think I like about M/S with my LSD2 is that it's a nice compromise.  My XY cards are almost muddy, my blumlein is too bright, but one card with one fig-8 is just right 

Although once I try XY with the V3, I might like it.

[DSatz]

SmokinJoe, depending on the relative amounts of M and S you use when matrixing, you are probably creating the effect of having microphones with patterns between cardioid and figure-8 when you play back in stereo. Since the LSD2 doesn't have a pattern in that range, that would indeed be a different effect from what you can get in X/Y or Blumlein with that mike.

In many ways, I think that "something-like-supercardioids" are often the optimal pattern for X/Y recording. Blumlein usually has too narrow a pickup angle, while X/Y with cardioids gives a result that's too nearly mono, especially for diffuse sound.

For me, if a stereo microphone has to have only three patterns, I'd prefer them to be wide cardioid, supercardioid and figure-8. Actually I do have a stereo microphone with those three patterns plus omni and cardioid--but I greatly prefer a good pair of small, single-diaphragm microphones with those same patterns, even though they're not quite as convenient to set up (or as iconic-looking).

--best regards