I agree completely.
The elephant in the room of audio and the reproduction
of music is that in fact most people do not seem
to WANT music at home that sounds like music in concerts.
They say they do, but in practice they have been conditioned--
or perhaps they are just like that--to want something else.
In the case of opera, the singers themselves want something
different. They want mikes on THEMSELVES, individual mikes.
Violinists can be like that too. I read a quote once
from Perlman in response to an interviewer raising the question
of whether he did not find one of his concerto recordings
somewhat over balanced towards the violin
He said(approx)
"My fans do not want to hear the orchestra, they want to hear me."
Singers are typically even worse on this,
But personally I find opera to sound far better
in a naturally done recording. If you can find one.
One of the great things about Soundfield microphone
recordings is that they are almost guaranteed
to be more natural sounding than others because
they are made from one point. RCAF is exactly right here.
One listens from one spot.
This is why something like the Unicorn Fenby Legacy Soundfield
orchestral recording sounds so wonderful: it sounds as an
orchestra sounds when you are there, and of course in one
spot.
Hardly anything is sillier than the idea that several
locations of microphones separated by four or five meters
can somehow be put together in a simple way to sound
like real sound. Talk about all the King's horses and all
the King's men putting Humpty together again...
Robert
On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aro <eero....@dlc.fi> wrote:
Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point
miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the
orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good
balance with one point miking.
Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT.
IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where people
in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then that means
there is a spot for single-point recording.
Recording the sound field at that spot should be equivalent of recording the
listening experience of a person sitting in that spot, and if the resulting
recording is decoded binaurally and played back over head phones, the listener
should hear what he would have heard sitting in that spot.
Listeners in the opera house don't bounce back and forth between various seats
during the performance to adjust which singer is singing where on stage. If the
singer can't fill the room appropriately with his voice, then either the room
acoustics, or the singer suck (or both), and in either case there's no need to
make a recording of such an even anyway.
So for real performances, single point micing, even though not a must, should
be adequate or superior for all events that are recorded in a venue in which a
live audience is supposed to have a good listening experience of an equivalent
performance.
If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone, recording
methodology, or both.
The key benefit of ambisonic mixing is to synthesize events that didn't exist
in a real acoustic space, but that are supposed to create a virtual reality.
Ronald
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