It allows me to experiment with microphone configs and feeds my masochistic tendency to haul more gear than needed to a show, but is generally not useful for the resulting mixdown.
I stand behind this. Learning how to analyse a given situation on the fly is very important for what we do, and having that experimentation allows for a more controlled experiment. The one time I've debated running 4 mics was to compare the tightness of patterns, not mixing them together. I ultimately decided not to because I already had an idea of how that would turn out (and lugging the extra gear thus wasn't worth it to me), but others who have multiple mic families at their disposal would see a greater benefit. There comes a point where one should reasonably know what to do and thus the benefit of the extra gear is deminished even further, but the educational process to get there is still very valid.
Granted, I don't have the critical listening skills some of you guys have. Don't really need 'em if it sounds good to me, though.
I also stand behind this. I can't stand clipping at the original point of A>D because there was a period of time when I had gear that did not behave well when playing back clipped recordings, even tiny bits. Now I have gear that behaves a little better with it, but I'm sensitive to that now due to that experience. Same thing with soundstage, once I changed my playback gear to gear that was able to produce a very detailed soundstage, I noticed what that did to a recording and having the smear from mixing became a disadvantage. If I couldn't hear it, it wouldn't bother me. This is the same vein as the "maybe it's your playback" thread.
Ultimately, many (I dare say most) of us tape for ourselves first and foremost.
If it sounds good to us, then that's a large chunk of the battle. It's nice if it sounds good for others, but at the end of the day,
you've gotta be happy with it first. I may value soundstage above a couple of other things, you may value some other things above soundstage, and that's ok.
I'm usually mixing a center semi-coincident card pair with a pair of split omnis.
What are people's thoughts on this? Sometimes I like it, sometimes not. When I do, it is the spaciousness of the split omnis together with the grounding of the center pair to get rid of the hole-in-the-middle effect. That said, I don't know that I've noticed soundstage smear or phase cancellation.
To recycle some of my response to Dale, if it sounds good to you, I wouldn't worry too much about it then. I've had a value shift over the last year or so to where smear is generally something I like to avoid (and I now understand why freelunch hates the sonosax and it's smear). There are occasions that it works well, but I find they are far and few anymore. On a side note, I think it works well when you're soundstage is already bad and smear improves either the euphoric quality or intellegibility of the primarily intended sound.
If I was going to do wide omnis and a center fill, I'd do just a single forward hypercard (or possibly figure8 ) channel for the fill in a decca tree arrangement and have the perpendicular angle of the tree's center/flanker capsules be on axis with the stacks in an attempt to minimize the phase cancelation within each channel. I've thought about doing that at a festival, but didn't want to mess with the setup and borrowing gear to accomplish it.
edit: stupid smiley in the last paragraph, fixed now.