Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Tech advice...recording equip?


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Posted by Rick Denney on February 17, 2003 at 18:49:45:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Tech advice...recording equip? posted by Mary Ann on February 17, 2003 at 15:35:43:

When I said close, I didn't mean two inches. I meant four feet instead of 14 feet. All instruments need some space for their sound to develop, and that is why microphone placement is so important.

I guarantee you that your minidisc recorder and that AT microphone will do as well as any 4-track portable studio that uses analog audio tape. If you get hiss when you turn up the highs to a natural level, then you have hiss in your room, or you are recording on audio tape. One advantage to the digital media is no hiss. Unless your microphone is faulty or malfunctioning, it will not supress high frequencies to make recordings sound dull.

In my experience, dull sounds are almost always the result of dull rooms, but you knew that already (and said as much in your post). So we can rule that out, too. And, I suppose we should rule out dull playing, heh, heh.

The three-mike rig that I describe is the same rig used by TelArc, and it's the same rig used by RCA in the old days, so it's not something new. It's a far cry from the 30 or 40 mikes used by, say, Deutsche Grammophon in the 60's, which resulted in some utterly unrealistic and painful mixes, though they did have lots of sparkle.

It seems to me that you are suggesting that the digital media may be at fault because you had success with a 4-track portable studio (I'm assuming that it used audio tape--many used cassette tapes) and a cheap road mike. I cannot agree with that suggestion, if that is what you really mean. The fidelity of even cheap minidisc recorders far exceeds anything that could be done on audio tape at up to ten times the price.

I still wonder if at some point you overdrove the recording. That would definitely, positively compress the high frequencies making the recording sound dull. It's tempting to push the peaks to something like +6 dB with digital formats, but I haven't seen any of the cheaper recording stuff that reads music peaks accurately. I set my levels so that the peaks are at 0 dB, and still when I record them into CoolEdit the peaks seem higher. This is probably the easiest mistake to make in using this stuff.

Rick "who thinks it's a lot easier to diagnose this stuff in person" Denney






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