Recording - September 2010 - 24

Five Neumann KM 133 D mics up high. assistant Joey Kloss had taken over an odd-shaped utility space for their control room—see Figure 3. Mike filled me in on the details of the recording.—LzR I’m well aware of your special relationship with Neumann—tell me about those orchestra mics. Mike Pappas: The KM 133 D mics we’re using have a sphere made of laserengraved plexiglass. They’re made with titanium capsule bodies and diaphragms, they have excellent reach, and being digital mics, with their internal A/D converters, they are perfect for the job. They are based on the M 50 that, back in the day, was used for still-famous orchestra recordings, in the formation called the Decca Tree. Until recently I had been using the M 150, they worked very well, but when I got a prototype of the KM 133 D, that was it. I can attest to the reach, I have never heard a harp as clearly in the room as I heard it downstairs in your monitors—and the harpist is sitting way back in the orchestra, behind all the celli! What’s the KM 133 D’s pickup pattern? That’s the thing about them—they are excellent omnis at low frequencies— they are really down by just 3 dB at 2.5 Hz but the spec sheet says 20 Hz... The sphere lets them be omnis to about 1 kHz, then above that they slowly become cardioids, and by 16 kHz they are hyper-cardioids. They’re out in black right now, the version in stainless steel will come out this fall. What about the setup? With those mics I need no spots, but they have to be high enough to reach into the orchestra. We’ve experimented and found that in this hall the best location is about 9’6” high, ten feet apart, five feet back from the edge of the stage apron, and the center mic goes in above the conductor’s head by about three feet. Any downside to that? Not really, not with a good boom. By leaning in the center mic catches the woodwinds better, but it also catches the conductor’s noises— Kahane is a fierce page-turner! What about surround? We have the KU 100 hanging halfway down the hall, facing the rear, about 10 meters up and about 40 feet back from the stage. [The KU 100, nicknamed “Fritz”, is a binaural stereo microphone, resembling the human head, with two specialized mic capsules built into the “ears”.] This is a huge hall—how do you get it up there? Boettcher is a union hall, and we have a good working relationship with the IATSE people. They installed a Grace Design m802 mic preamp above the dummy head on the catwalk. That preamp has built-in A/D conversion, and sends digital audio (AES/EBU) about 600 or 700 feet down to my “control room” via CAT5 Ethernet cable. For the onstage mics we have the racks off to the side that also connect to our room in the basement. The permanent two mics that are always flown high above the conductor’s spot are Neumann KM 184. We don’t use them.

Miking and Mixing
A Symphony Orchestra
Interview by Lorenz Rychner On the first weekend of June, 2010, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (CSO) performed the farewell concert under the baton of departing Maestro Jeffrey Kahane. Mike Pappas was tasked to record the concert in 5.1 surround while also providing a live broadcast mix for Colorado Public Radio (www.cpr.org). The program opened with Kahane conducting from the piano while performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27. After intermission he conducted Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Boettcher Hall in Denver, the home of the CSO, is cavernous, too large really for a concert hall, and with its not entirely successful in-the-round layout it provides an acoustical challenge. This is not news—had it not been for the recent downturn of the economy, a long-overdue renovation would by now be well under way. The stage being wider than deep, Pappas set up not just a left/center/right array, but he included “flankers” further out on each side—see Figure 1. For the piano concerto there was also an M/S array above the lid-less grand: one Neumann KM 184 D (digital cardioid) and one Neumann KM 122 D (digital figure-8)—see Figure 2. After listening to the Mozart from out front, I spent the second half down in the bowels of the building where Pappas and
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RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2010

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Recording - September 2010

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