Topic: Mk22 advice wanted

[adrianf74]

Thanks for all advice!

I owned these and they were, by far, my favourite Schoeps caps to run and I pulled some AMAZING recordings with them.  Depending on if a show was mixed mono (and in many cases, the ones down on the "beach" in Toronto were), I would simply pick a stack and stand about five or six rows back with my hat tilted towards the speakers.   I generally do PAS when using a hat anyhow... if I could only own one set of caps, these would probably be it.

[morst]

Wide card is mathematically halfway between cardioid and omni.
In a good sounding spot, these should be the semi-directional butter!


 

[adrianf74]

Wide card is mathematically halfway between cardioid and omni.
In a good sounding spot, these should be the semi-directional butter!


 

Most likely the reason I love my Line Audio CM3's.  Definitely not the same mic but a lot more affordable.

[checht]

The mk22s have become my favorite caps, and I've used 4s, 5s, 21s, and 41s. When deployed properly, their sound is everything I'm looking for: detailed yet expansive, warm but not dark, and capable of great imagining and a rock solid sound stage.

I use them 4' split in an OMT4 config, with 41s in the center, outdoors and in reasonable-sounding rooms. Also, had I Nick modify my actives to put a binder m & f inline on one cable, so I can use a binder extension cable to split them as much as 17'. Most commonly, I split them 6' to 14' onstage, about a foot up from the lip, at 8"-10" off the deck, and they are amazing in that setting, producing a wonderful, clearly separated image. Matrix with a pair of 41s ortf above the drums, and vocals off the monitor mixer. Getting my best recordings of Steely Dead this way, to my ears.

Here's an example, a bit of soundcheck from Kona:
https://archive.org/details/sd2024-02-24.matrix
About 2 minutes in, during the keys solo, is a good example of the sound stage, w keys & guitar on L, drums C-R, and bass R.

After 40+ years of recording, learning so much these days. What a blast!

[robeti]

Thanks much!
I just got home from recording Black Pumas. I was 5th row from the stage.
I used the mk22s in a dina hat mount.
My first impressions: much more omni sound than cardioid sound. Full rich sound without being too bass heavy. The show was very bass heavy but the mk22s capture this beautiful without being boomy. It will require a bit more work in post (screamers, clapping etc.) I think I prefer this sound over cardioid and hyper cardioid.

[adrianf74]

Thanks much!
I just got home from recording Black Pumas. I was 5th row from the stage.
I used the mk22s in a dina hat mount.
My first impressions: much more omni sound than cardioid sound. Full rich sound without being too bass heavy. The show was very bass heavy but the mk22s capture this beautiful without being boomy. It will require a bit more work in post (screamers, clapping etc.) I think I prefer this sound over cardioid and hyper cardioid.

There are times where the 41's are clutch but if you're up close, the 22's are gold as you've just learned.

[goodcooker]

Thanks much!
I just got home from recording Black Pumas. I was 5th row from the stage.
I used the mk22s in a dina hat mount.
My first impressions: much more omni sound than cardioid sound. Full rich sound without being too bass heavy. The show was very bass heavy but the mk22s capture this beautiful without being boomy. It will require a bit more work in post (screamers, clapping etc.) I think I prefer this sound over cardioid and hyper cardioid.

I ran my HO subcards in dina quite often. The high end is very directional but the low end seemed to end up sounding very mono due to the caps being placed close together. I did it this way to minimize my footprint when recording onstage same idea as what you can fit in a hat. Best compromise for the result.

[Gutbucket]

There are times where the 41's are clutch but if you're up close, the 22's are gold as you've just learned.

The mk22s have become my favorite caps, and I've used 4s, 5s, 21s, and 41s. When deployed properly, their sound is everything I'm looking for: detailed yet expansive, warm but not dark, and capable of great imagining and a rock solid sound stage.

I use them 4' split in an OMT4 config, with 41s in the center, outdoors and in reasonable-sounding rooms. [snip]

Don't mean to take this OT, but one of the design intentions of OMT4 is to accommodate a wide range of taper situations via the ability to tweak the balance between the two very different yet complementary stereo pairs by leaning a bit more on one verses the other as needed, sometimes even working cross-balances between the two.  Open patterns like Mk22 and mk21 are particularly attractive for this as I see them as inhabiting something of a sweet spot over on the omni side side of continuum of pickup patterns, with super/hypercardioid inhabiting a similar position on the opposite bi-directional side, and the 50/50 "cardioid-compromise" inhabiting the middle.  The pattern-continuum sweet spots strike me as being not 100% omni nor 100% bi-directional fig-8, nor a straight 50/50 combination of the two like a straight cardioid, but more of a Goldilocks "just right" balance on either side.  Seems to make an especially good combination when both pairs are arranged to work together and support each other as a team without elbowing in too much on what the other does well.

An interesting irony is that OMT4 still works and remains robust when setup the inverse way. That is, setup either in the typical way with the highly directional pair in the center (X/Y supercards, say) with the more open pattern pair spaced out to either side, or in the opposite way with the more open pattern in the coincident center (say as a Mid/Side pair with mk22 Mid, mk8 Side) and the more directional supercard pair spaced out to either side of that in PAS.

Over the past weekend I was going through some SD cards and ended up listening to an OMT4 setup I recorded a few years back similar to that, which used a much more open MG cardioid as Mid in the center M/S pair and MG m21 supercards in the wide pair positions.  Direct PA clarity was primarily contributed by the wider spaced supercard pair while the ambience, depth, sense of space and dimension were primarily contributed by the more open-cardioidish M/S center pair, rather than the other way around.

[DSatz]

morst, the original post had asked about the MK 22. It's the MK 21 that's halfway between omni and cardioid. The MK 22 is between an MK 21 and cardioid (!).

The MK 21 was introduced in 1988 under the awkward name "wide cardioid". But it behaves more like an omni that just happens to be 6 dB down in the back. In terms of "tone" and "feel" of the recordings it makes, it has about 80% of the aesthetics of a good omni, including the seemingly limitless low-frequency pickup and spatiality. A pair of them can be used in spaced setups as if they were omnis; the result will be somewhat clearer because there's somewhat less room sound.

But paradoxically, at high frequencies the MK 21 has a broader pickup pattern than an omni; for reasons of physics, small pure pressure transducers become "beamy" above 6 - 7 kHz while the MK 21 does not. This means that the wide cardioid doesn't become much darker sounding with increased distance in a reverberant space (where the proportion of sound dulled by multiple reflections increases). And due to their directivity, pairs of "wide cardioids" can be used with relatively narrow spacing between them -- a foot or two, for example -- without any "acoustically opaque" object between them such as a Jecklin plate or a sphere. This gives excellent spaciousness and stable localization simultaneously, which widely-spaced microphones of any kind can't deliver (omnis least of all, sorry to say).

All in all, I think that many people who record with spaced omnis as their main stereo pair would be considerably better off using high-quality wide cardioids instead.

The MK 22 came along some 20 years later. In a more rational universe, in retrospect _its_ name should perhaps have been "wide cardioid" since it really is a variant of cardioid with a somewhat wider pickup pattern, just as supercardioid is a variant of similar degree in the other (narrower) direction. It offers a warmer-sounding alternative to standard cardioids, in that its off-axis response is almost entirely free of any high-frequency rise; at 45, 60 or 90 degrees its response curve runs almost completely parallel to its on-axis response. That's also true of the MK 21, but the MK 22 has greater directivity, so it can be used somewhat farther from sound sources without losing focus.

[checht]

Many thanks for insight!

[morst]

morst, the original post had asked about the MK 22. It's the MK 21 that's halfway between omni and cardioid. The MK 22 is between an MK 21 and cardioid (!).

Metaphorically, MK22 had three cardioid grandparents and one omni!? Or thereabouts!?
 
Thanks as always for sharing your insight!

[Gutbucket]

[snip]But paradoxically, at high frequencies the MK 21 has a broader pickup pattern than an omni; for reasons of physics, small pure pressure transducers become "beamy" above 6 - 7 kHz while the MK 21 does not. This means that the wide cardioid doesn't become much darker sounding with increased distance in a reverberant space (where the proportion of sound dulled by multiple reflections increases). And due to their directivity, pairs of "wide cardioids" can be used with relatively narrow spacing between them -- a foot or two, for example -- without any "acoustically opaque" object between them such as a Jecklin plate or a sphere. This gives excellent spaciousness and stable localization simultaneously, which widely-spaced microphones of any kind can't deliver (omnis least of all, sorry to say).

All in all, I think that many people who record with spaced omnis as their main stereo pair would be considerably better off using high-quality wide cardioids instead.[snip]

Thanks. That helps to collate what I hear with your description of what's going on.  Excellent description.