Topic: Recording in a room with a low(-ish) ceiling

[connloyalist]

I was wondering... if you are recording in a room that has let's say a 10' ceiling (3 meters). Is it better to setup the main pair as high as possible under the ceiling, which means that the mics might be an inch or two away from the ceiling? Or will that give nasty reflections and it would be better to stay a foot or two below the ceiling and accept that the main pair won't be as high as you would like?

Regards, Christine

[DSatz]

There's an unspoken "all other things being equal" which unfortunately doesn't exist when the ceiling is low, or when any other dimension(s) of a room are small. Such a room will have a marked sound of its own no matter what, which you'll hear in your recording--and it is likely to be rather bad sounding unless you get distinctly closer to the sound source(s) and/or use microphones with greater directivity (narrower pickup patterns) than you would ordinarily do in a room without this problem. That may give you a recording that's drier than you prefer--but you can always add nice-sounding reverb later on, whereas you can't subtract the effect of a boxy, restrictive space on a recording.

That's more important than the direct answer to your question, which is that whenever you have a microphone close to any room boundary, you get comb-filter (partial cancellation) effects; the closer you get to the boundary, the higher the frequency in which the ragged response will occur. (This is why boundary layer microphones are literally built into (or onto) room surfaces such as floors.) In other words, the region near the ceiling usually isn't a zone you want to have your microphones in.

All of us who use simple miking techniques are utterly dependent on the quality of the recording space that we're working in. There isn't a magical type of microphone or method of placement that can overcome bad acoustics.

--best regards