I'll try to listen this weekend. I started typing the reply below a couple days ago but never got back to it, Just finished it up..
Just got back in town and following up. Glad it went well. Looking forward to listening later.
Gutbucket (or anyone), is there any benefit in a situation like this to pointing the mics slightly to the outside of the stacks? Cardioid patterns don't start dropping off significantly in pickup until they're 30 degrees or so off center, so would it make sense to skew each mic, say, an additional 15 degrees to the outside, amounting to a total split of 64 degrees?
I run WAAAAY wider than the stacks often. Works great.
KM140 cardioids for that.
Was amazing live in loud headphones at redrocks, I guess it amplified the wall sounds a little, which made it even more redrocksy.
Mmmm, Redrocksy!
Clarifying a bit more for nulldogmas. You are correct that if pointed not overly far outside of the PA, the mics will still be sufficiently on-axis to pick up the PA and on-stage sources with very similar level and response. What altering the angle will do within that "not-overly-far" range in addition to effecting stereo width and imaging is include or exclude a bit more of everything else. With the best mic arrangements we are capturing a good balance of both dry-direct sound (the clear up-front soundboard like qualities) and reverberant, ambient, room and audience sound (everything else). The best recordings are a balance of both.
Pointing the two microphones of a stereo pair directly at the PA is a technique specific to tapers recording from audience positions much farther away from the source than most other forms of music recording. The
why of "point at stacks" is more or less obvious - it's intended to pick up as much of the clear, direct-arriving sound sound as possible from the recording location. Nothing particularly strict about arranging it. The main thing
Improved PAS does is try to make the most of other stereo aspects that are secondary to the primary goal of picking up sufficient direct-arriving stage and PA sound with good clarity, but are very nice to have as they make for a better balanced recording that conveys the live feeling of being there at the concert.
Sure, you can angle the mics wider than the PA, and doing that is often a good idea for a few different reasons. One is if you aren't able to arrange the mics with a wide enough spacing to support the narrow PAS angle. In that case a wider angle compensates for the narrower spacing to help stereo playback sound more wide and involving than it otherwise would (some of the secondary good stuff). Another is to include a touch more reverberant sound, room reflections, ambient and audience sound when desirable - stuff of secondary importance, but the stuff that helps convey a "you are there" type listening experience - all the stuff that makes it
more Redrocksy. Good important stuff to my way of thinking, but not as vital as getting good direct clarity first and foremost.
More in depth answer why-
Generally there is no problem angling the two mics of a stereo microphone pair more widely (or more narrowly) than the width of ensemble or source. Arranging things that way is totally normal and the way most stereo-pair microphone pair configurations work. In fact, all of the popular named near-spaced stereo microphone configurations (ORTF, DIN, DINa, NOS, etc) and most X/Y configs produce a
Stereo Recording Angle that is significantly wider than the actual physical angle between the two microphones. To clarify, The
Stereo Recording Angle (SRA) is the virtual, forward-facing "stereo acceptance angle" as viewed from the recording position, inside of which sound sources can be expected to be reproduced as phantom imaging positions between the two speakers upon playback. Sound sources that are positioned outside of the SRA will instead tend to be heard as emanating either directly from one of the two speakers or sometimes diffusely from outside the speaker triangle.
Most of the time the physical angle between the microphone pair and the SRA
are not the same angle. That's certainly the case for standard PAS as traditionally used, because the spacing between mics is traditionally not increased much or at all as the angle between mics is made smaller in order to point them directly at the PA speakers. That in turn makes the SRA much wider than the physical angle between the microphones. So, one of the more useful but quite unusual things about
Improved PAS (where the spacing between mics is changed based on the angle between them), is that that with Improved PAS,
the SRA is always the same as the PAS angle. One thing that allows you to do is more easily visualize the resulting image distribution - the sources located between the mics will be reproduced between the speakers, while the sources outside of them will be reproduced either from the speakers or more diffusely. Geometrically, the width of the physical performance stage and position of the sound sources on it as viewed from the recording position can be expected to fill the stereo playback triangle between the two speakers, making it sound wide and involving with good stereo separation,
even if it didn't sound that way live.That playback image distribution / sense of width is one of three aspects effected by the angle between the stereo microphone pair.. and although it is sort of the cream on top of a great recording when everything else is working right in support of it, it is arguably the least important and most esoteric of the the three. The most important thing is always getting sufficient direct-sound clarity first and foremost, secondarily getting the right amount of everything else in support of that clear but dry and flat direct-sound, and third achieving good image and stereo width - so nice when right but ultimately the least important thing in the hierarchy of a good live recording.
