Topic: LD's or CA 14's........

[OhioHead]

This Friday The Dead & Company roll into Cbus, I have an official taper ticket.

Assuming I can get my mic's 11 feet in the air, do I run Bill S modded Oktava 319's (fixed card's) or CA-14's?

The Oktava's will go into a 1.5 (2015) LittleBox > M10, CA's will go CA-9200 > M10........

What would you run and why?  I would run both rig's but I only have 1 M-10.

[OOK]

I would think you will get better bass response with the Oktava 319's and they will certainly be quieter than the ca's, not that it matters in a loud environment. 

Have Fun! OOK

[OhioHead]

This has nothing to do with your mic selection, but the 2015 littleboxes were v1.

Thanks Jon for the clarification!

[OhioHead]

I would think you will get better bass response with the Oktava 319's and they will certainly be quieter than the ca's, not that it matters in a loud environment. 

Have Fun! OOK

When I ran he 319's @ SCI a couple of weeks ago I picked up a "ton" of talkers & I am trying to prevent this.

SCI was @ a smaller venue and was set up @ the SBD but not an "official" taper section.

[acidjack]

I would think you will get better bass response with the Oktava 319's and they will certainly be quieter than the ca's, not that it matters in a loud environment. 

Have Fun! OOK

When I ran he 319's @ SCI a couple of weeks ago I picked up a "ton" of talkers & I am trying to prevent this.

SCI was @ a smaller venue and was set up @ the SBD but not an "official" taper section.

I don't know how CA-14s will solve that problem but they will certainly sacrifice some quality.

[barrettphisher]

Oktava's all the way.  You  are never going to pull a tape with no talking or crowd noise, but the higher up you can get those mics it will help. 
Barrett

[OhioHead]

Thank you Barrett & AJ.......Oktava's (high as possible!)> Littlebox 1.0 > M10 Friday night it is.......

Was looking @ the DH LD mic positions last night because I wondering if I should run a tighter spacing and I realized I misplaced the orginial mic holders, when I went to my Rycote's.......:shakehead & :kickdirt tear apart bedroom tonight........

Oktava's all the way.  You  are never going to pull a tape with no talking or crowd noise, but the higher up you can get those mics it will help. 
Barrett

[Gutbucket]

To maximize pickup of the direct sound from the PA and minimize pickup of ambient sound from everything else (the room and audience), without changing your position in the room or your microphone pickup pattern, raise the mics up high and point them directly at the speakers (the stacks).  That's the PAS (Point At Stacks) microphone configuration technique. 

The remaining mic-configuration variable you have control over at that point is the spacing between the microphones.  As the angle between microphones gets narrower, the spacing between them should be made wider to compensate for the narrowing angle.  So when recording from farther back, your mics will have less angle but more spacing between them.  From closer up front, the mics will have more angle and less spacing between them. 

The following table is a quick guide to appropriate spacings between the two microphones as determined by the angle between them when they are pointed the mics at the stacks.  If you can't setup the mics with as much spacing as is called for in the table, get them as wide apart as you can and open up the angle slightly, so the mics are pointing just a bit outside of the stacks.



An easy way to estimate the angle between stacks is by standing at the recording location, closing one eye, and holding a fist out horizontally at full arm's length.  While squinting though one eye, count how many adjacent fists it takes to cover the space from the center of one stack to the center of the other.  A fist at arms length covers approximately a 10 degree angle, so if you measure 6 fists between the two stacks, that's approximately a 60 degree angle.  A 60 degree angle between mics ideally calls for a spacing of 48cm (~19") which may be difficult to do unless you have a wide enough mic-bar.

[edit- here's a link to the TS discussion thread with details on where this comes from and why this works- http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=167549.0]

[OhioHead]

Thx u Gut!!!!!

[Gutbucket]

U r welcome Ohi!

The PAS technique is intended to optimize clarity and pickup of the direct sound from the stage and PA as much as possible compared to the reverberant and crowd sound.   Doing that is more important than optimizing the "stereo-ness" of the recording, which is more of a secondary nice-to-have thing in the grand scheme of what is most important for a recording to sound acceptable.  PAS using an even more directional pickup pattern than cardioid, such as supercardioid or hypercardioid, can help even more with this.  Good stereo imaging and envelopment isn't worth much if the main sound of interest is overly distant, muddy, and buried in room reverb and crowd noise.   Moving the recording position is the best answer, but that isn't always possible, so this helps makes the best of a position which may be a bit too far back, is too reverberant or has more crowd noise than one wants.

When your stereo mic setup has only a minimal amount of angle between the pair of mics, as is usually the case with a PAS setup, using a wider spacing as compensation is a compromise to improve the "stereo-ness" of the recording.   What you loose in level-difference between channels by the mics not being angled apart as much, is compensated for by having more time-difference between channels from the wider spacing. 

Basically what this is doing is trading level-difference stereo (produced by the angle between directional mics) against time-difference stereo (produced by the spacing between mics).  A narrow angle and close spacing will produce a rather monoish recording.   A wide angle and too much spacing produces a hole in the middle.  But within those extremes we can trade angle against spacing to some extent, and the PAS table is a way of doing that to best effect while maximizing clarity and pickup of the direct sound by having directional mics pointed directly at the sound sources of interest.