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"An engineer's job is to place microphones where they sound good, and record from the moment musicians are present until the space is empty."
— Wally Heider
Grammy and Academy Award winning engineers tell Wes Dooley that proper selection and placement of the microphones is the most critical part
their art. Since 1972 AEA has manufactured tools to enable reliable and repeatable microphone positioning.
Single-stand stereo arrays configured with AEA's Near-Field N22 and Far-Field N8 Big Ribbon NUVO microphones produce highly accurate
recordings that are very easy to assemble using the AEA SMS stereo mic kit.
First, try recording Blumlein stereo, comprised of two coincident
crossed bi-directional microphones, where the principal axis of
each is co-aligned with the null axis of the other. Note that the
front and back quadrants are in-phase and of equal sensitivity
but of opposite absolute polarity; the two side quadrants are
out-of-phase with respect to each other.
The Blumlein array provides the most accurate left-to-right
stereo imaging of any mic system.
Next, try recording with a small spacing between the
two microphones. A common near-coincident stereo
configuration is ORTF, which uses two cardioid mics at a
spacing of 17 centimeters and an angle of ± 55-degrees.
When configured using bi-directional microphones,
retaining the angle of ±45-degrees and a separation of
less than 25 cm, the array will preserve the accuracy of
the Blumlein pair and add a sense of spaciousness and
envelopment.
ribbonmics & preamps
www.ribbonmics.com | tel: +1-626-798-9128 | fax: +1-626-798-2378
since 1964
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