su6oxone, thank you for the kind words, please don't worry too much about my vanity, and I actually kind of think we're both right, depending on what you expect a recording to do with room sound. Just let me drop a very brief seventeen-page essay on this topic and I'll be ready to move along.
Rooms have an acoustical property called "standing waves" which result in particular frequencies being highly emphasized in certain places within the room, and highly reduced in others. At any given point in the room where a listener or a microphone might be, you'll have an oversupply of certain frequencies and an undersupply of others, often by large amounts (many dB). These occur most markedly at low frequencies. We don't normally listen to music with our heads clamped in a fixed position within the room; we move around, and our brains integrate the differences in spectral distribution to give us a rich impression of the space that we're listening in.
Microphones, on the other hand, only pick up that information for the particular points at which they're located, and when we play back the recording, there we are again in a room and we're moving around and integrating information about many points in space--just not the space where the recording was made, usually. (I guess you could break in to the club and listen to your tape over their sound system after everybody's gone for the night; I do that at Carnegie Hall all the time. Seriously, though, if you could do that, the sound quality would manifestly suck because all those irregularities would now be twice as great.)
Anyway: Along the range of transducer types from pure pressure transducers (e.g. single-diaphragm omnis) to pure pressure-gradient transducers (figure-8s), with cardioids being smack in the middle and super-to-hyper-cardioids being somewhere between the middle and the pure pressure-gradient end of the spectrum, a funny thing happens. An omnidirectional microphone will pick up the peaks and troughs of these standing waves from all three dimensions of spatial orientation, while a pure pressure-gradient transducer has a null in one plane, eliminating two of the three dimensions as far as pickup up the energy from these standing waves is concerned. Cardioids are in the middle--they get one dimension completely and the other two partially, and for supercardioids the "two partially" get picked up substantially less.
So even if the on-axis frequency response of a super- or hypercardioid was as flat as could be, it would be delivering a clearer and more neutral sound in this respect. But some people definitely find this disappointing simply because they are used to having more of the other stuff. The sonic location of the individual points in space occupied by your two microphones both is and, at the same time, isn't really what you want a stereo recording to be about. Depending on what you expect a recording to deliver, the effect on the listener is definitely different; the quantitative analysis alone ("a given pattern of microphone will deliver X% direct sound vs. Y% reflected sound at a given distance") doesn't really account for it. In some ways, it's like what LP surface noise does for someone who's used to vinyl records--add it to a digital recording and those people who are habituated to it will begin to hear all kinds of things they like in the recording, which they don't let themselves hear (and it's not necessarily even conscious on their part) when that noise isn't there to give them permission, so to speak.
"All things" aren't generally equal, though--the low-frequency free-field response even of very good super- and hypercardioid condenser microphones generally isn't as flat or extended as the comparable response of many cardioid condensers (which in turn are inferior in this respect to wide cardioids, which are then beaten by pure pressure transducers). So it's quantity plus a specific kind of bass that people become attached to, no doubt. I hear it, too, and there are plenty of times when I like it and go for it in my recordings, especially when singers aren't involved (orchestral music, organ music, percussion ensembles).
Still, the word "thin" (which I agree applies to every low-to-medium-priced super- or hypercardioid condenser I've ever heard or tried) seems too strong a word for what a really good super- or hypercardioid can deliver, unless a person is using an exaggerated pickup of low frequencies as his standard of comparison. I don't mean that personally; I just mean in general. And my point was that while for omnis and cardioids there are good-sounding, non-thin, non-screechy, not-too-exaggerated-in-any-one-respect choices available for not too much money, the same can't be said about super- and hyper-cardioids (or figure-8s for that matter), so the inherent sonic qualities of the patterns (which is a less than fully sensical way of talking, but people do it anyway) can't be judged from the most readily available examples of those patterns.
--best regards, and happy Valentine's Day to all
Topic: Looking for new mics... recommendations? (Read 9028 times)