Rating sound quality

The warm welcome in the forum encourages me to rise an other topic that is everlasting, but possibly uncommon from my angle of view. I think we all come recurrently into the position to evaluate the quality of transmission be it on the recording or the reproduction side.

The careful, precise but also tedious procedure is to do elaborate listening tests on the reproduction side with different CD’s with carefully selected and widespread musical material. Those who own their own recordings are favoured since they know, how they should sound.

On the recording side, the situation is more difficult. Unless you know the location and the kind of performance well, you are up to do a number of experiments based on your experience. In a live situation - and as an ambitious amateur not working for money - I only have the chance to do it during the rehearsal before a concert, this is a challenging work. Often then, when the hall gets filled just before the start, you find everything changed but it is too late to make changes on the stage. My status only has the advantage that it may either be a unique take or sometimes a complete mishap without inducing further consequences.

Within this environment I have come to a very simple, concise but valid criteria to rate the quality of such an event. It is simply to listen carefully to the hands clapping of the audience at the entry of the musicians or at the end of the performance. This noise like sound gives me an instant information about the sound quality in the sense of being dull, smooth or rather peaky. It also reveals much about the brightness in the stereo image or indicating a narrow image. Of course there is little information about  the correct mixdown but it indicates the basic atmosphere being caught correctly or not. Unfortunately in the recording situation this indication is late and in this case kind of post-mortem.

I would be glad to get comments on this from the well trained professionals.

I don't know that so many of us are so well-trained as just politely housebroken.  But Ozpeter, Mr Zemlin and SteveG do a good bit of location recording and will all agree that if you don't have a handle on how the room will respond, a figure-8 pickup is an ace-in-the-hole because of the options it gives you after-the-fact.  I have done a limited amount of location recording over the years, but with little ability to experiment with pattern micing.  These days my circumstances are such that we multi-mic everything to excess, and I'm always paddling backwards to try to make it sound in the end like it was wasn't.

As far as the timbre/acoustic nature of recorded applause being an indicator of success while on an unfamiliar location, in my opinion it's a valid piece of the puzzle, but only one of a number of them.

I don't know that so many of us are so well-trained as just politely housebroken.  But Ozpeter, Mr Zemlin and SteveG do a good bit of location recording and will all agree that if you don't have a handle on how the room will respond, a figure-8 pickup is an ace-in-the-hole because of the options it gives you after-the-fact. 

Hmm... the more open mics you put into any given acoustic, the less good applause will sound - which is why most broadcasters mic applause separately! I'm fortunate - I don't do so much recording with an audience present these days, so I don't have the option to listen to it live very often, but I have to say that I've never really regarded it as any sort of arbiter of how good the wanted sound is going to be. But MC's correct in one sense - if you want to capture as much of the acoustic in a space as you reasonably can, a fig-8 is a good bet for stereo. And that's quite often what I would use as a distant pair - a lot of flexibilty there.

As far as the timbre/acoustic nature of recorded applause being an indicator of success while on an unfamiliar location, in my opinion it's a valid piece of the puzzle, but only one of a number of them.

I think that as far as it goes, I'd agree with that. But since I do what the broadcasters do on those few occasions that I do live stuff, I don't usually think about it from that POV, and I don't think that I'd like to rely on it...

If I can get a sound that's acceptably similar in the control space on near-field monitors to what I can hear in the space itself, I'm generally satisfied. Okay, it's become a lot easier to achieve this since I got the alter-it-after-the-event Soundfield, but the basic principles of how to achieve this haven't changed, and in a very real way, the SF makes it easier, because it's easy to listen to it as a mono omni mic - always a good starting point.

But it's been interesting over the last couple of years - I've thrown out some of the practices I previously used as far as micing is concerned, and I'm trying some new stuff - which I'm still analysing. The latest one (although not used in anger yet) is a Jecklin Disk, although I have to say that it was really invented by Blumlein in the 1930's, and not Jecklin at all. I may be unpopular in some quarters for saying that, but UK Patent 394,325 fig. 1 has it there, for all to see. And Blumlein's ideas seem to have quite a knack of working out, one way or another.

But I reckon that a pair of omnis either side of a disk would probably make a good applause recording, certainly!