[Closed] What's annoying you currently? (Complaining now banned)

And to think the original Mercury Living Presence series of albums were recorded with one mic.

I was just checking on that too! It certainly came out on the Mercury label but this may have been another arm of the Mercury label?

Early 50's

I'd like to see him try!

The theory behind the mono one microphone set-up is like sitting in the middle of the first row in the balcony. What the symphony is playing is what you hear with your ears. The recording duplicates this. We don't hear in stereo.
Thomas

At a seminar about film sound I attended in September, an experienced sound designer explained why he still thought using mono technology was the best way to work. I can't remember his arguments (as I'm a complete n00b when it comes to these things), but they sounded very convincing at the time...

Excuse me for being rude but how do you know that? I am a working sound engineer and last November we used 48 microphones just to do a standard (if financials allowed it, we'd use even more) recording for a commercial CD with this orchestra here http://tsso.gr/.

What you say about a small number of mics is completely false;

Basic rule of psychoacoustics: What you hear is ALWAYS a combination of the direct sound and the reverberant sound coming from all the possible directions around you, above, behind and below you, from 360 degrees. The greater the number of microphones used for the recording and speakers for reproduction, the more coherent the reproduced sound field will be, with greater depth and in some cases, more realism.

At home, what you hear from your stereo hi-fi system or headphones is a mixing of all those signals in 2 channels (stereo), 1 channel (mono) or more than 2 if it's a surround recording that's going to be reproduced in a large number of speakers except if it is a VERY old recording which was recorded with a very few number of microphones. For many years now, the signals that feed the speakers come from a large numbers of microphones which are located in such ways as to capture as much amount as possible of the direct and reverberant sound.

But truly, it's a huge subject matter to explain in any online forum and without the other party knowing some of the basic rules of psychoacoustics. If you want to read further on the subject matter, pm and i can tell you a book or two that will help you get the big picture behind this.

That is an amazing book, i have it and it's really well-written. Plus the author is one of the most well-known in the field: EVEREST, Alton, F., Master Handbook of Acoustics, Fourth edition, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., USA, 2001
http://www.amazon.com/Master-Handbook-A … pd_sim_b_1

This is pretty popular but i haven't read it personally: Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, Third Edition
[FP387] David Howard, Jamie Angus - http://musicbooksplus.com/acoustics-psy … -7103.html

BALLOU, Glen, Ed., Handbook for Sound Engineers, The New Audio Encyclopedia, Howard W.Sams & Co., A division of Macmilan, Inc., USA, 1987

TALBOT-SMITH, Michael, Audio Engineer’s Reference book, Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd, 1999

Also this explains a lot on how we hear and why STEREO IS good (although there's a lot to be done with surround systems and 3d sound from that point onwards) : THEILE, G., On the naturalness of two-channel stereo sound, AES/SMPTE, Joint Television Conference, Detroit, USA, 1991

Also check out the work of Günther THIELE and Helmut WITTEK two very respected German sound engineers and professors, over at www.hauptmikrofon.de and www.schoeps.de

Also check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereophonic_sound

and this which i am sure you'll love

How audio codecs work - Psycoacoustics By Victor Vergara, Christopher Davis : http://www.audiodesignline.com/howto/au … /175800470

This is a true analog system from start to finish

Just listen to one of the recordings sometime. It had to be something of a multi-directional mic. I fully understand your points and they are well taken. I'm merely trying to explain some of the older technology to you.

Holy crap! Thanks D. (And I've never thought that stereo sound has ever had the need to be defended!? I think Tom is clutching onto days passed by. )

What's blood insomnia?

Without why.

Also, I dropped my model DeLorean this morning and Mr. Fusion fell off...