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June 25th, 2002
Do people generally produce radio pieces in stereo or mono? I love the sound of stereo, but I’ve learned of an affordable mono mini-shotgun mic (Audio-Technica) and I’m thinking of buying it.
Any experience in this?
I would recommend producing your piece in stereo, but that does not mean that you can’t use a mono mic. In fact in most cases, it will sound better to do your primary interviews in mono. if you can capture some ambience, or use music (if it’s that kind of a production) in stereo, you’ll greatly enhance the vividness of your soundworld. But interviews done in wide stereo often sound twitchy, with voices wandering around the stereo field, etc…
the best of both worlds is to carry both, a stereo mic for ambience and a mono mic for interviews (of course many stereo mics can be switched to mono, or the tracks can be panned-to center at the mix stage, so if you have a good stereo mic that can double as an interview mic, you are set.) But even a cheap stereo mic can be sufficient to get some background ambience if handled carefully.
How do you feel about using two mono mics (one in each hand) fed left and right into the stereo jack of the recorder. This might have advantages in the field, giving freedom to capture, say, a conversation without jumping back and forth with one mic. When it comes to processing maybe you could pan both channels to centre and pick and choose which mic/s to have live at any one time.
Holding two mono mics doesn’t appeal to me for several reasons. I hold enough in my hands and don’t want to have to hold something else. Indeed, I want one hand free. Also, I can fit only one mic into my minidisc recorder input jack.
But it’s funny you should suggest that idea, because I’m considering buying a something that is in effect what you’ve described. It’s called a gooseneck stereo mic. This mic has two small cardioid heads on stiff but flexible gooseneck wires, and plugs into a single mic jack. This is a much more practical and less expensive solution, I would think, than using two mono mics.
Thanks for your answer!
Adam Schwartz
if you can handle it ergonomically, the two-mic solution is a viable choice. The only thing is that you will encourage people to interrupt one another! It doesn’t always work, but often having one mic can control the conversation a bit, folks start trying to get your eye and waiting for you to point the mic at them (especially if you hip them to this at the beginning…"if the mic’s not pointing at you, i can’t hear you very well.")
I haven’t used the little gooseneck mics, although I think they look pretty cool. The big risk there is that the mic element is pretty close to the machinery, and most of the DATs and Minidiscs that i have used make some physical noise, which will end up recorded to your track. But for sound gathering in noisy circumastances it might not matter at all.
if you do get those mics, please tell us how you like them!
I’ve often used two mics in the field, just pocketing one when it wasn’t needed. (I like the old Sennheiser K3U capsule system. They were a good match for most portable units. The new K6 isn’t quite as sweet sounding and tends to overload.)
With two mics, you can conduct a simple interview with one, and then pull out the other (already jacked in) when you want stereo or more radius.
Many people seem to like the Shure VP-88 Stereo Mic (ref. Barrett and Jo on their bicycles in the GUESTS section) which can be dialed down to mono or to different stereo spreads. Our org just bought one on Ebay, so we’re going to check it out.
Rode just released the NT4 stereo mic. It’s kind-of funny looking, like a prop from a sci-fi movie, but it’s built on the same body as the NT3, which is a good solid (mono) battery-powered cardioid condenser mic.
Even the NT3 mic is a little heavy, which is to say, solid, so the NT4 will be even a little more so. The main advantage is that the NT4 will sell for about $450, which is a good deal for a quality stereo mic. And it ships with two cables, one that ends in two XLRs, the other ends in a stereo mini, so it’s ready to go for a little minidisc or a DAP1 or HHB, or studio mixer.
It’s gotten some good reviews. I’ll let you know what I think as soon as I get to try it.
Check it out:
http://www.rodemicrophones.com/NT4/NT4.pdf
The main advantage is that it’s $450? For normal people I suppose, but for me that’s like two weeks’ salary. I’ll have to stick with my Sony MS-907 ($99.99) for now.
Agreed, $450 isn’t chump change, but it’s cheaper than the $700-$800 range for the Shure VP88, or even more for a Pro Sony, way more for an AKG, or Neumann, or Shoepps rig, etc. The inexpensive Sony mic will work for many applications. But they are not super-durable, are succespible to handling noise, and don’t have fantastic frequency response.
Even so, as I have mentioned here before, i have gotten some very nice stereo ambience with $10 Radio Shack stereo mini-lavaliers, so i’m open to the idea of inexpensive mics saving the day.
One down-side of the Rode NT4: I doubt you could have it do double-duty as a main interview mic as well as your ambience-collector. Not that it wouldn’t sound good, it’s just that it would scare the heck out of people to point that thing at them at close range!
Just picked up a somewhat beatup but useable TC-D5M. Love the sound and solidity of the thing. And the bouncing VU meters are too cool.
But my question: Plugging a mic into, say, the left jack naturally produces sound on the left channel only. Is this the best way to record something I want eventually to be able to hear on both channels (like an interview)? Or should I get some sort of Y chord to plug the mic into both the left and right jacks and record the interview on both channels?
Just plug the mic into one channel and go. You’ll hear it only one side of the headphone. No problem. The only time you need to have it show up on two channels is the end of the broadcast chain.
As Jay said, just record one channel it’ll come out fine in the mix.
It can be a bit annoying to listen like that, and it can be hard to monitor critically with one ear. But using a Y-Cable on the input can have a negative effect on the sound quality of the recording, so be careful.
You can get headphone adapters at Radio Shack that will take the one-ear signal and put it into two. The sound will still only be on one channel (this isn’t a Y input adapter), but you’ll hear it on two… if one bothers you.
Jeff, I saw your great article on stereo mike technique and thought I would share this experience. A year ago I was digitally recording a live concert performance and had a couple tracks available to do some experimenting.
Most people ‘decode’ the M+S into two channels with a splitter box before recording. What I wanted was the option, in post-production, of making adjustments to how much of the Side signal was injected/mixed into the Mid thus allowing me after-the-fact tweaking of the stereo image. So I directly recorded the Mid and Side signals. I use Sony/Sonic Foundry VEGAS for audio post-production so the necessary inversion and summing was very easy to set up and to manipulate.
I have a three mike R0DE coincident array I built but I also set up the Mid-Side array and fed it into two separate tracks to play with the results. (Mid+Side always captivated my techie curiosity.) The M+S mikes were a pair of Studio Projects C3s, one in Figure-8 and the other in cardioid (or was it omni?) pattern. Capsule ends were pointed at one another and adjacent with the two mikes mounted vertically. (Pretty weird looking actually
The results were ‘technically’ if not esthetically interesting. As memory serves I got a stereo image and by adjusting the amount of S signal injected/mixed I could change the image. This is something I want to test further. I think my idea of being able to tweak the stereo image after recording could be very useful. The limitations I had were the nature of the source material, a large choir, the mediocre acoustics of the room, and the fact that I was recording digitally at 48kHz/24-bit. If I had gone to 96 kHz, at least with the high end frequencies, might provide more precise phase relationship information and might have had a positive impact on the stereo image product.
I’m curious if you have experimented with this.
Wayne
hi folks,
i have been experimenting with m-s for a while and have exellent results. recording m and s separately is a possibility, but not a necessity if you want to change the stereo basis afterwards:
since L=M+S and R=M-S, i suppose if you pan your decoded L-R channels to center, you get:
L+R=M+S+M-S, or 2M, in other words gone is the s-mike!
so if you record as "wide" as possible, you can do the same trick as wit the separately recorded m and s-channels, get everything between max stereo and mono…
a good reason for recording LR this is that not all folks have m-s decoders… more people in editing are able to use this LRformat.
bye
steven
Stereo recording are very nice for recording atmospheres but never ever for dialogue. Usually u pick up more background and even the plastic cups from crew having coffee at catering truck. You record all except the dialogue. Atmosphere can always be replaced by better ones, dialogue can too but i prefer not to.
On the MS issue, don’t burn your finger on that. Might be nice for documentaries but not on feauture films. Phaseproblems occur all the time and Dolby encoders fuck it up as well. Your stereo image turns around every time the shot counters.
L-R becomes R-L then, very tiring to listen to.
Sound guys on the set should try holding the boom in place much better instead of expanding their kits with BS in order to raise their dayfees.
You can also get the S by inverting the R channel and summing it with the L. The formats convert pretty seamlessly. I think M-S is more common in Europe for features than it is in the US. It use to be a big deal to find a converter box so a lot of M-S got used as mono for lack of a decode box. But now anyone with a DAW can decode M-S so it’s sort of up to you.
SK