Thanks Hugh; my mental picture of what’s going on there turned out to be closer than I expected. All thanks to what I’ve picked up reading SOS reviews and articles on ambisonics (and largely forgotten).

Possibly worth a play if I ever catch up with my “retirement jobs”.

“All sorts of clever ways” immediately sounds beyond my comprehension, but are we talking about changing the stereo image at will (but without height information, I guess, as it’s stereo)?

And the decoder is a plug in for one’s DAW?

Just to be totally sure - have you checked that one channel’s polarity isn’t reversed? Even the two bottom-end Rolands I’ve had - FP30 with speakers and RD150 stage piano without - have been full and rich from the line outs. Worth being totally sure there isn’t an error of this kind being made …

I kind of replied to this in your other thread, BeeDice, but I would add that DI’ing a bass is more common (among the bands I’ve been in or worked with) than DI’ing a guitar. There’s a lot of stuff in a guitar signal that needs “sanitising” through a speaker than there is in a bass signal … But one p ...

Even with speakers, you’re moving air in a way you won’t with headphones, say. If you record your piano’s line outputs and play the recording back through your piano speaker(s), it should sound like it does when you play it through the speakers, give or take the facts you’re listening but not playing ...

I paid a tenner for mine …

It’s plain to see you’ve done lots of training, Hugh. I started reading your main post thinking I knew nothing about patch panels and by the end I’d relearned a lot, plus a couple of other bits, and had it all presented clearly enough to stand a chance of penetrating to my brain. I’ll probably never ...

I tried a couple of admittedly cheap short-scale basses instead of my Hofner violin bass, but I had so many intonation problems I went back to the Hof. With the appropriate flatwounds (La Bella Deep Talkin’ Bass) it sounds like “a bass” and still the E string sounds like a totally different instr ...

I know even less about taiko drums than I do about things I have miked live, but when I was doing SR for outdoor wind band concerts I often had pro brass players in the band who made a lot of sound, in a feedback-prone situation with 30+ open mikes. I had half a dozen each of the Beyer M201s and ...

Yes, that’s one bit of the book I do remember! This thread has got me thinking, though. My keyboard skills are rudimentary, to say the least, and my piano (1934 Bluthner model 2, 7’6”) lovely to play (noodling, usually) but not exactly recording-ready in either technical condition or location; it wou ...

And despite my previous post, so would I. With the right stand(s) and hardware, mikes the same diameter as an XLR connector and a few inches long are way less visible, on top of doing this particular job better. And omnis won’t normally need a huge shock mount … 30 or 40 years ago I wouldn’t have sai ...

“Client pleasers” in my world, if you’ll forgive me butting in with a feeble joke (oh, and thank you, Hugh, for so clearly and properly explaining what what was nearly in my head in my rambling earlier post). But, seriously, when I only had a pair of LDCs I was usually halfway there when I opened the ...

I’d guess the SDC Oktavas (presumably MK-012s) in a near-coincident array or possibly even spaced at the tail of the piano will work fairly well. I do have a pair but have used the cardioid capsules mainly for instrumental spots - I use the omni caps more often, TBH. I’d probably set them up in NOS c ...

Just be aware that you will have to have your computer on even if you just want to listen to your rega through the speakers. The evo is powered by the usb connection. This is the perennial problem, of course. As my Mac is on a desk in the middle of my listening/work room, and the hifi is down one ...

I’m in the process of retiring from and assessing a life in amateur music (mostly classical). The thing about amateur performance is as Michael Green pointed out in “the Art of Coarse Acting”: the cast is having a night out enjoying itself and the punters are playing the part of a real audience. When ...

That’s one of the things normalisation is for. But if the original’s from vinyl, pound to a pinch of snuff the original recording’s on Apple Music or whatever, and would be a whole lot better sounding. You can still tweak it in Logic (or even Audacity) should you wish, but something that’s been recor ...

https://preview.redd.it/yza8p5b4ig661.jpg?width=320&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=d9274d8629107e13233373a6ebd548fd7ba8efd4 Oh, yes, that accords very closely with my memories of using Windows - about that time, too (XP era). By dint of aggressively pursued ignorance of the workings of MacOs I’ve had a p ...

So what’s the net result of all this? Is there any pinout that has sonic or robustness benefits, or do we just choose one make and stick with it? I’ve been wondering if it’s something I could use to reduce bulk (remember I have a push-bike friendly recording rig, in mind if not totally in real life) ...

And I’ll just go a bit nearer Woolworths than heaven and say, since I followed advice from the good experts here on SoS and started recording on field recorders (Zoom F6 and F3) I’ve found it a lot easier. With my cheapo Recording Tools ribbon mikes, I just use a couple of FetHeads. I’m not saying I ...

Yes, it’s always been Watford Gap. I live a few miles due East of there, and I know this is in the midlands of some sort because people North of it reckon it’s in the South whereas Southerners reckon it’s in the North. Mind you, I suspect most Londoners do reckon anything north of “their” Watford is ...

Well, to the deafening silence of universal apathy this is what I've done so far: the Rode ring mounts arrived and they seem pretty good and able to hold the weight of the NT2a easily. With these on, I'm in the same place as other mikes in my store, given that most are sans shock mount and the ones ...

Thanks for your unfailingly comprehensive replies and I’ve BBC a bit of a think about where I’m going. In the first place I’ve ordered a pair of Rode’s ring mounts, which presumably will give the same sort of results as the mike clips on most of my other mikes. I’ve tested the cradles before getting ...

Brian Eno, I think, was also involved with an ensemble whose players traversed the scale in quality and experience pretty widely. As he said, and I quote from memory "occasionally we would by some miracle converge on a few brief moments of coherent ensemble playing before crashing onto the runway ...

I’m with Sam. If I could have back the hours I spent fettling PCs (and at the age I lost them!) I’d have done more music at an age when I had the muscle and stoopidity to burn the midnight oil.

Yes, this is it; not normally a problem. I suppose I’d like to feel “covered” if I use a shock-mounted mike in difficult circumstances rather than discover at the last minute it’s making things worse because it’s too tight. And the mike I just bought has one spectacularly-stretched band I definitely ...