Recording - July 2015 - 61

This intensity stereo has in common with
panpot stereo that the directional information
is provided by differing levels between the two
speakers; however, XY microphones are typically placed out in the room, where they can
record the room's sound as well as the instruments'. (Not always, though; see below.)
A Blumlein setup works the same way, but
the two capsules in the stack are bidirectional, with pickup patterns that resemble
Figure-8s, and they're angled at 90° to one
another. Figure 3 shows a Blumlein pair,
using two large diaphragm multipattern
condenser mics; it can also be done using
a pair of ribbon mics, most of which are
inherently bidirectional.
Like the XY setup, a pair of mics in
Blumlein configuration creates its stereo
image via intensity differences; also like XY,
the capsules are close together and there's
little phase difference between the channels,
so again mono compatibility is excellent. A
Blumlein setup will pick up more sound from
behind the microphones than XY, but it will
reject more sounds from the sides. (By the
way, the technique was named for the brilliant English engineer Alan Blumlein, who
did some of the most important early
research on stereo back in the 1930s.)
M/S coincident miking
M/S (sometimes written M-S) stands for
"Mid/Side" or "Mono/Stereo", and it's
unusual in that you can twiddle with it after
recording. Figure 4 shows M/S being implemented with another pair of large
diaphragm multi-pattern condenser mics.
The "M" microphone is set to a cardioid pattern, and pointed forward, directly at the
instruments; the "S" microphone is set to a
bidirectional pattern, and pointed 90° to the
left, so its null is pointing toward the instruments. They're recorded to separate tracks.
During mixdown, the M and S tracks are
combined; adding the M to the S creates the
equivalent of the left-pointing mic in an XY
setup, while adding the M to a copy of the
S with its polarity flipped creates the equivalent of the right-pointing XY mic. Varying
the amount of S (and flipped-S) in the mix
lets you vary the spaciousness of the resulting stereo signal after it's recorded; in effect,
it's an XY pair whose angle you can adjust
in the mix rather than on the mic stand!
In theory, the M and S can be different
types of microphones; I've seen it done with a
condenser mic for the M and a ribbon for the
S. In practice, though, the technique works
better when the mics have similar characteristics, so it's usually done with an identical pair
of multipattern mics, set to different patterns.
Mics like this often have similar frequency
responses at different pattern settings, which
makes them ideal for use as an M/S pair.
M/S has two more advantages. The first
is essentially perfect mono compatibility;
when the two channels are combined, the S
signal (on the left side) adds to the invertedS signal (on the right side); the two should

cancel one another out completely, leaving only the M signal remaining-in effect,
a mono recording made with a single cardioid mic. Also (second advantage): that
M mic is pointing forward, where the instruments are; techniques like XY and
Blumlein pick up the center of the ensemble off-axis, where the mics' pickup patterns
may be squirrelly, while M/S recording aims the M mic squarely up the middle.
Before leaving the coincident setups, I should mention that several companies,
including AKG, Avantone and Neumann, sell or have sold stereo mics with dual condenser capsules and head amplifiers; one capsule can be swiveled to various
angles, and the capsules' pickup patterns are adjustable, so that the stereo mic can
be used for XY, Blumlein or M/S recordings. Other companies, including AEA,
Audio-Technica, Cascade, RØDE, and Royer, sell stereo mics with dedicated XY,
Blumlein or M/S arrangements. The stereo microphones built into portable digital
recorders are often an XY pair.

1

ORTF near-coincident miking
Finally we get to the setup I used for the Ottoman Underground session. Figure 5
shows an ORTF array, executed using small-diaphragm condenser mics; ORTF
stands for Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, part of the French national
broadcasting organization. When stereo was still relatively new in the 1960s, that
agency devised this technique which captured stereo information by combining
intensity differences (because the cardioid-pattern mics were at an angle to one
another) with arrival-time differences (because the mics were placed with the capsules separated). In the classic ORTF setup the capsules are angled outward 110°
and separated by 17 cm (about 7"). A similar near-coincident technique, called
NOS, was developed by the Dutch national broadcasting organization; in NOS the
mics are typically set at an angle of 90°, with the capsules separated by about 11".
You'd expect these near-coincident arrangements to have poor mono compatibility
due to the separated capsules, but not so, at least for ORTF. While the separation of
7" would normally cause a good deal of comb filtering at frequencies from about
950 Hz on up, the cardioid patterns of the mics come to the engineer's rescue. Yes,
a signal from the left side of the array hits the left-hand mic before it hits the right, but
it's also well off-axis to the right-hand mic, and the cardioid pattern drops its level in
the right-hand mic by up to 20 dB, enough to forestall any major comb filtering. That
means that ORTF recordings, like XY and Blumlein, have excellent mono compatibility. NOS recordings, because of the greater separation between capsules and lesser
angle, have slightly poorer mono compatibility, but I'd still class it as "Very Good".
Before I leave the descriptions, I want to note that I drew the XY and ORTF pictures incorporating a K&M 23510 stereo bracket, also sold by AKG as the
KM235/1; this device has seen me through several decades of stereo recordings.

2

RECORDING July 2015

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2015

Contents
Recording - July 2015 - Cover1
Recording - July 2015 - Cover2
Recording - July 2015 - 1
Recording - July 2015 - 2
Recording - July 2015 - 3
Recording - July 2015 - 4
Recording - July 2015 - 5
Recording - July 2015 - Contents
Recording - July 2015 - 7
Recording - July 2015 - 8
Recording - July 2015 - 9
Recording - July 2015 - 10
Recording - July 2015 - 11
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