Friends, Cohorts, References...an unordered list


More Info

There's usually a good discussion of pro(fessional) and pro(duction) audio topics on the newsgroup rec.audio.pro. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from this group was written by Gabe Wiener, who died on April 9, 1997 at the age of 26. His FAQ is an excellent starting point for inquiry. Gabe started (and we maintain) the ProAudio mailing list which has a interesting discussion (and a lot of history in the archives). There's also a "DAT-heads" mailing list that carries a lot of information on live taping of music, tape copying trees and the like. DAT-heads regular Jeff Maggard assembled a Microphone FAQ in 1993 that still has more useful info than many expensive texts on this topic. You can get it here on recordist.com in text format or in hypertext with links

Be sure to check out Meridian's Acoustic Renaissance for Audio, a worthy diatribe that might just get some of the needed hooks in place on one of the new formats so that, for once, maybe, there might be enough bandwidth for good sound in some commercial media.


A Rant about Canonical Recording Techiques

Often, we get inquiries about the precise orientation of ORTF, NOS, Jecklin disk, Decca tree, etc. Well-meaning enthusiasts have been known to obsess about the precision in spacing and pointing microphones according to these documented recipes, as if recreating some textbook orientation would guarantee, or even contribute to, success. While there is good reason to precisely duplicate a setup once you are pleased with how it sounds in a given room, it's actually destructive to your understanding to spend a lot of energy on getting it precisely to someone else's recipe. These methods are starting points which must be adjusted to fit the equipment, the room acoustics, the performance and your own taste. Sometimes the "magic" methods are changed in mid-stream, for instance the Jecklin disk system of using omni mics and a round baffle, or the various iterations of omnis on a sphere as described by (among others) Güunther Theile at the IRT. Much can be learned by studying other recordists' approaches, particularly if they write well about things to listen for (as Jecklin has). Read and think, don't copy!



rev Oct 09