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Gear / Technical Help => Microphones & Setup => Topic started by: greenmtnsrider on March 27, 2015, 04:47:20 PM
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Recently picked up a pair of hyper caps and thought about running them in X/Y in a less than ideal room with one over head speaker. What do you guys think?
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I like that far more than cards in X/Y. But you need to angle them pretty widely at about 115 to 120 degrees between the two for good stereo though. That setup is more appropriate in a decent sounding room, from closer, onstage or stagelip.
In a less than ideal room and/or farther back, I'd run them near-spaced with less angle between them instead. You'll get progressively less room and more direct sound as you make the angle between mics narrower, and as you do that you'll need to compensate for the narrower angle with increasingly more space between the two.
Even though you have only one PA speaker, PAS still applies generally. The mics won't be pointing directly at the overhead PA, but pointing them at outer edges of the stage will be a safe bet. If you are getting sound from on-stage as well as the PA at the recording position, consider angling the pair upwardsto point halfway between the stage and overhead PA. If it's all coming from the PA, point them up more until they are on the plane which intersects the overhead PA.
(http://taperssection.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=153112.0;attach=105743;image)
[edit- don't sweat about exact spacing too much. The general trend of more mic spacing when you have less mic angle is the thing. The table above was calculated for cardioids, for hypers use a bit less spacing. Hence my suggestion for X/Y at 115 or 120 degrees (no spacing / coincident) rather than 5mm as suggested by the table]
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The single stage monitor puts out a lot of sound as well. Both are placed in the middle of the stage. So the overhead room speaker is usually directly on top of the monitor.
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Theres a bit of a discussion about it here: http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=171395.0
I've tried it a few times on stage recently. Seemed to work out fine to me, but to be fair I'm not a particularly critical listener.
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What Gutbucket said.
I don't have much experience running X/Y.. but this is the Oade Brothers explanation..
http://oade.com/Tapers_Section/xy.html (http://oade.com/Tapers_Section/xy.html)
http://oade.com/Tapers_Section/xya.html (http://oade.com/Tapers_Section/xya.html)
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Heres a couple shots of the room...Im thinking of running the hypers up high in the staging where the CA set up is. So either in X/Y or PAS...along with DIN or ORTF cards, onstage omnis and a board feed. The monitor that is pictured on the stage is usually on the floor directly in front of where the drummer is in the picture. I usually set the omnis near that. The single room speaker is directly above where the monitor typically is. This will a single acoustic/electric guitar peformance. Any thoughts?
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I'm not a huge fan of hypers XY. You get incredible depth, but a rather squashed soundstage. I usually run hypers DINa (17 cm spacing, 90 degree included angle), even in less than ideal rooms. The hyper caps do a good job of focusing on the source, while the 17 cm spacing gives you a decent soundstage. You can always try running one set of each configuration and see what you like best.
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I agree about not running XY and running near-coincident and running them a few inches apart. XY sounds weird with hypers IMO, and you get a much better recording with them spaced a little versus XY, but tha's just IMO too 8)
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X/Y with super- to- hyper-cardioids (I doubt that many people here have actual hypercardioids; they're very rare) can give you better depth and spaciousness than X/Y with cardioids. I suspect that a lot of people haven't tried angling them apart far enough to get there. It seems wrong visually, if you think of the mikes as having narrow pickup patterns, so you have to put more faith in your ears and/or in the math that says to set them farther apart, either in angle or distance or a combination of both.
But also, many--probably most--microphones with directivity greater than cardioid are designed primarily for speech pickup and P.A. applications, and are lacking on the low-frequency end to begin with. That would be OK (we could all avoid those types of mike) if frequency response graphs were designed to show the low-frequency response for distant sound sources. But in practice they're usually not, and that makes it hard to know what you're getting.
Most published frequency response curves are plotted at an "equivalent measuring distance" of only one meter. At that distance a directional microphone will already have audible proximity effect--so the graph shows stronger bass response than the microphone will actually deliver for more distant sound sources. And proximity effect is greater when the pressure-gradient response of the microphone is a larger proportion of how it works, i.e. as you go from omni through the cardioid to the figure-8 end of the spectrum (super- and hyper-cardioids being closer to the pure pressure-gradient end of that line). So if you're used to the way a certain manufacturer's graphs look for (say) their cardioids, you can easily be fooled when looking at their graphs for supercardioids or figure-8s.
Making that situation even worse, one prominent, very high-quality manufacturer uses only about a one-foot equivalent measuring distance. Thus their supercardioids (they don't make figure-8s to my knowledge) appear on paper to have adequate low-frequency response, but there's a really large discrepancy between what the same manufacturer shows for their omni (pressure) microphones (their original product area) and their more directional microphones. Another very high-quality manufacturer uses something like half a meter. That may correspond to the way they intend their microphones to be used, but it can be very deceptive for customers who want more general-purpose music recording microphones.
So as a method of self-defense, always pay close attention to the applications that the manufacturer suggests or shows for their more directional microphones. If the catalog photos show a directional microphone being used close up--as a solo performer's microphone, or as part of a P.A. system--chances are strong that its response is tailored for that application. That will make it tend to be rather thin sounding, for the kind of distant/semi-distant music recording that most of us do.
--best regards
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Thanks dsatz. I am always picking up valuable insight and info from your posts...
Fwiw, I ran hypers the other night-the results are here:
https://archive.org/details/rre2015-03-19.c422.flac16
I think there is some good imaging going on, but would love to hear what you think. I guess I could widen the angle, and center the mic by eye, rather than using the 90degree split and aiming by pointing the set screw in the mount directly back at me (which is easier to see when it is ~12' high up in the air (since the windscreen covers the caps, so I can't look at them)...
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That's a common setup issue I think, it can sometimes be hard to tell exactly where the center is pointed with the mics hoisted!
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That's a common setup issue I think, it can sometimes be hard to tell exactly where the center is pointed with the mics hoisted!
especially when there are no bodies to look at, so to speak. With the c422, there is nothing really to look at except for the set screw in the back and the emblem on the front, and if the angle is changed, those won't do any good, either ;)
not saying I won't give it a try, just saying it will be a challenge...
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When I was using the Peluso P-Stereo more often (an LD stereo mic like your c422) I had the same orientation issues. On top of that it's capsules would rotate to no more than 90 degrees wide, so I'd often run it M/S instead of X/Y, using either a cardioid or supercarioid mid pattern, which at a 1:1 M/S mix ratio produces virtual supercards angled approximately ~130 degrees, or hypercardioids angled ~115 degrees. In addition to getting the mic angles I wanted, it also made it much easier to align the microphone correctly with the Mid capsule facing directly forward and the 8 facing sideways.
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When I was using the Peluso P-Stereo more often (an LD stereo mic like your c422) I had the same orientation issues. On top of that it's capsules would rotate to no more than 90 degrees wide, so I'd often run it M/S instead of X/Y, using either a cardioid or supercarioid mid pattern, which at a 1:1 M/S mix ratio produces virtual supercards angled approximately ~130 degrees, or hypercardioids angled ~115 degrees. In addition to getting the mic angles I wanted, it also made it much easier to align the microphone correctly with the Mid capsule facing directly forward and the 8 facing sideways.
i run m/s often with the supercardiod as the center, but when I am farther back and in the center, like I was at the show I linked above, i have been running hypercardiods x/y. Always interesting to learn other techniques, and the rationales behind them. Thx.