On 2014-08-06, Garth Paine wrote:
I have always found the SPS200 and even the older Soundfield mics noisy and find the Core mic unusable in ambient environments - of course in a music concert it is a different story as the program amplitude is generally much higher.
Might be a stupid question, but... Have you ever truly quantified the gain structure of your whole rig, from start to end, piece by piece? In absolute amplitude, weighted or not?
I mean while you can't "exactly" call it a rookie mistake, it's still pretty common that people just leave too much headroom, and in all the wrong places, and don't even come to think of evening it out over the whole chain.
That's especially common with the kinds of big, high voltage, old time, pro mics like the original Soundfield, because they're really rated to meet their specs at the very edge of their envelope. If they say it takes 120dB, it takes it; don't be squeamish. You don't really leave any headroom there, even if you plan on actually, physically going to 120dB for the duration. And for the most part, you won't actually go anywhere near that, so that you can safely turn the thing down, bringing the noise down along with it.
Then, when you've set the maximum amplitude at the input stage, you always work down from there. It ain't gonna get louder unless you made it so, and in that case, you should recalibrate the stage in the chain so that it doesn't amplify, but at most once reaches the maximum amplitude it can take in a fully linear fashion.
In live, ambient situations you might be tempted to leave headroom just in case. But seriously, what's the probability of a sonic boom happening right above, or the environment otherwise changing so fast you can't gain-ride it? Pretty much zilch. Or if it's not, well then you ought to be running multiple mics side by side at different gains, kind of like they do HDR photography.
I know, this is recording-fu 101 or something. But at the same time it's still the reason for the vast majority of noise problems. Especially when dealing with exotic mics such as soundfields, at the crucial first stage of a recording.
-- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front +358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
