These are recordings in the âoldâ style. But that is not the case with above (Paul Berner & Michael Moore). These are âmoderneâ (nowadays) sound but recorded with just one microphone.
⌠but not what many people would think of as âone microphoneâ, as itâs a Calrec Soundfield mic which is (I think) a tetrahedral array of four capsules and needs a bit of fun post processing to make a stereo master.
The lovely stereo AEA ribbon in the video isnât strictly a single mic either.
I think the poster is getting at an approach to capturing the sound in the room the way old school classical engineers would - with a single mic array - and no spot mics and minimal mixing.
So that one was recorded with a Josephson C700S - which has 3 microphone capsules (two directional, one omni) in the single housing.
So far these are all co-incident mic techniques (first order ambisonic, blumlein pair, c700s)
Many purist classical recordings use ânear co-incidentâ techniques (mostly ORTF) or spaced omnis / arrays (eg Decca tree), because the timing differences help with stereo imaging.
I do not want to spoil your contest, but I can tell you from vast experience with (mainly classical) recordings and conversation with a lot of recording engineers, that the idea of one-point-recording is pretty dead not without good reason.
If you have a heterogeneous group of instruments or voices differing in directivity, SPL or any other factor how they interact with the recording hall´s reverb, I would bet that any minimal-mic´d recording will always be sounding inferior. Not to speak of larger groups like orchestras or big bands.
I believe it is an illusion to think that the full three-dimensional sound field of a performance can be captured and reproduced by such technique. Even with formats like Auro3D which would allow that theoretically, in practice in will not work. Not to speak of two-channel stereo for which a recording engineer always has to make a different compromise in terms of balancing direct and indirect sound from the recording studio for different instruments.
My greatest admiration goes to the work of Siegfried Linkwitz when it comes to understanding how a loudspeaker interacts with a room and spreading that knowledge. But it occurs to me that the idea of a one-point-recording contest is doing this appreciated work no favor as it is fundamentally misunderstanding the way how instruments, singers and microphones are interacting with the room.
Itâs a common place, that itâs not possible to reproduce the original wavefront with stereo.
Physics does not allow this, neither on the recording side nor for the rendering side. We are left with the possibilities to create an illusion of life-likeness.
Of course, sound engineers, that didnât get good results with this technique, makes them feel, that the method cannot work properly.
Iâm respecting your own experience with focus on classical recordings.
However, we have experience with rendering mostly jazz, folk, bluegrass recordings of that type. The recording engineers involved pretty much know what they are doing. It sounds fantastic and is preferred by our audience.
Itâs not for everyone, not for every musician, not for every recording engineer. Not for every size of orchestra, and not for every recording room.
The method may be dead for you, but please respect the experience and opinion of other sound engineers, that produce stunning results. Iâm not sure if you ever could experience this for yourself. Please, come by and visit us on one of the upcoming Audio Shows, e.g. AXPONA in April 2025.
Letâs not forget that we only have two ears, so we always hear âin stereoâ. Even if it wasnât possible to reproduce the original wavefront with stereo, that is not necessary in order to reproduce the experience of a static listener. A binaural recording should in theory suffice for that, and since that would require two mics in close proximity (i.e. the diameter of a human head), it could be considered a co-incident minimal-mic technique.
Mellencamps "No better than thisâ is recorded mono to an ancient analog tape recording machine. And now it seems the album vanished from streaming services. Thatâs a shame.
Could you link to an example please? And to which sound engineers or record labels are you referring to when saying some stick to this technique? I know only people who moved away from it.
I was not only meaning classical music but pretty much everything that involves instruments/voices of different sound pressure level and directivity, particularly jazz, rock. Folk with very few musicians not involving drums/percussion/brass/loud woodwinds might be an exception here.
I have no problem with people liking such recordings, but I have not heard a single example not showing the typical flaws of one-point recordings while being pretty limited in terms of instrumentation, dynamics, recording room and musical expression. Usually not the ideal base for a creative process involving musicians.
What might be interesting, though, is the possibility to do one-point recordings with immersive formats such as Auro3D or 2+2+2 trying to find out how far this goes. You still have limitations but not as problematic as with 2channel.
I would rather highlight that hearing with two ears and hearing two-channel stereo have not much to do with each other. Thanks to the HRTF even one of our ears is capable of astonishing things like localization, reverb analysis and alike. Such information inevitably gets lots in a two channel recording (non-binaural recordings, I might want to add).
Stress on ´theory´ as HRTF related localization and perception of reverb pretty much depend on our own head and ears as well as our ability to use micro-movements of the head to stabilize these effects. Things which even sophisticated head tracking and HRTF simulation are not capable of reproducing so far.
The main problem as I understand it is that the relation between an acoustical event (voice, instrument) and resulting indirect sound events like reflexions, echo and reverb with all their parameters in three dimensions gets lost with any microphone (even a dummy head can only capture a fraction of that).
As human beings in a live concert, we can consciously ´focus´ on an event like letâs say a bassoon or viola (which often get lost in an orchestral mix). Our ear can understand the relation between the direct sound and the resulting three-dimensions sound field and focus on the former if wanted. That is not possible in a stereo mix as all vector information gets lots and the ratio between direct sound information and pattern of reflexions is fixed on one hand and has nothing to do with the way our ear is perception them, but it is purely the result of how a microphone captures this combination.
Every apprentice sound engineer has to learn about that and train necessary measures to recreate this possibility to hear such an instrument (e.g. by boosting the direct sound level with the help of additional nearfield mics).
That is mainly what is gets inevitably lost in a one-point recording.
Again, it makes no sense focusing this discussion on trying to exactly recreate the original wavefront with stereo.
That is not possible! Microphones are just tiny probes in a relatively large wavefront.
Instead, recording and replay âmagiciansâ need to create an illusion, that produces a believable sound stage in the listenerâs minds, using the available tools, today.
Find experienced sound engineers for minimal micâd recordings in Annex 1 of our contest announcement. LINKWITZ Minimal Microphoning Medal Contest - LINKWITZ.store
Siegfried Linkwitz already pointed to this recording technique: AS_creation
âIt should be possible to use a single coincident XY microphone pair as the basis for rendering the spatial relationships between individual sound sources and their interaction with the reverberant sound field of the recording venue.â
and
âWhen more than one microphone is used to record a larger group of sound sources, then signal overlap and timing differences between the microphone outputs will lead to a loss of clarity when panned to left, center, right respectively.â
The microphones used today for minimal micâing are not necessarily only X-Y arrangements. Good results can be heard with eg. 3-capsule Josephson C700S, AEA R88 or a pair of Earthworks, separated by a modified Jacklin disk.
Could you link to or recommend examples of true one-point recordings made by Bob Katz please? I know him mainly as a mastering engineer. Or are you referring to what he did with David (Chesky)?
With all due respect to Siegfried Linkwitz but this is a just a theory which most of recording engineers who are experienced with mic placement would probably disagree with or find outdated. I do not intend to get into details too much but such XY mic arrangement when being placed in a proper distance to instruments and singers usually brings inherent problems with bass reproduction and differences in the ratio of direct to indirect sound depending on the source. The latter are in most of cases resulting in the aforementioned imbalance of different instruments.
As no cardioid mic is perfect in terms of frequency-depending directivity you usually get emphasized direct reflexions and reverb from the walls behind the stage and the ceiling and attenuated reverb from the rest of the hall or studio, particularly the side and back walls. This leads to overly dry and direct results from higher directivity index instruments such as brass or higher registers of the human voice and on the other hand overly reverberated, distant and diffuse results from omnidirectional sources such as strings and woodwinds. And it makes the room sound smaller, more sharp and boxy with reverb being less smooth as the more annoying early reflections are highlighted and the characteristically diffuse parts of the fading reverb from the sides and the back are masked/attenuated.
This might have been the case some 40 or 50 years ago but today we have individual digital delay for every channel and lots of possibilities to do a more natural ´panning´ of spot microphones. Thousands if not tens of thousands of acoustical recordings are done each year by very experienced recording engineers using such techniques and I do not see a general trend of them lacking clarity. Rather the opposite, I would say that one-mic arrangements bringing the inherent problems with early reflections have a tendency to lack clarity, if we are talking about more than a handful of musicians.
It would be nice if there where more recordings like that.
