surfingalien wrote:
I use an Asus EEE PC 901, Edirol UA-25EX USB soundbox, Octava MK-012 microphones (matched pair with omni-directional, cardioid & hyper cardioid capsules), good quality cables, fairly nice microphone stand with adjustable microphone holders. And of course Audacity
I don't know about the EEEPC, but you report that it works well. The other equipment looks good for the job, they have all received good reviews and provide a lot of options for how you do the recording.
The hyper-cardioid capsules are likely to "colour" the sound more than the others, but are useful if you have problems with picking up too much room / audience sound.
Cardioid capsules can give a nice balance and should work well with X-Y stereo microphone technique. If cardioid microphones (or hyper-cardioid) are used for close mic'ing they tend to emphasise the bass as you get closer to the sound source - this is not usually a problem, but just something to be aware of.
The omni-directional capsules are great for A-B stereo recording and will often produce noticeably cleaner/more natural bass response than other techniques (when listened to in stereo). While it is true that this method can cause phase problems if mixed to mono, how many mono players do you come across these days? AM radios, mono cassette player and the like usually have relatively poor sound quality anyway, so any phasing effects are unlikely to be significant. IMO the main practical problem with spaced pair/array recording is that setting up the optimum microphone placement can require considerably longer to set up.
NOS and ORTF use basically the same method - the only difference is in the spacing and angle of the microphones. Some Dutch sound engineer decided that the sweet spot was NOS, and a French sound engineer decided that the sweet spot was ORTF. If you have time, experiment and make up your own mind.
X/Y is probably the usually the quickest to set up as the only placement issue is how close to the performers.
NOS, ORTF, and XY are all pretty reliable techniques so long as the room is kind (nice acoustics, not too much room noise and the practicalities of microphone placement are achievable).
kozikowski wrote:There is a stage recording technique that eliminates the floor reflections by putting the microphones on the floor.
This can be (and often is) done by mounting the microphones on boom stands (providing that the boom is long enough to reach close to floor level).
It can also be done with PZM microphones - a technique sometimes employed in Theatre.
Other than PZMs, microphones should not be placed directly on the floor for the reasons given in previous posts - plus the likelihood that someone will kick it across the room.
billw58 wrote:I'd run the Edirol at 24-bit, 44.1 kHz. Obviously, set Audacity to the same.
Audacity could be set to 32bit providing that it will run smoothly with this setting. Up-sampling from 24bit to 32 bit will do no damage. For best sound quality, any processing done in Audacity should use 32bit audio tracks. Processing in Audacity is always done at 32 bit, so if tracks are of a lower bit depth it will introduce a small amount of noise. I don't think it will matter if you record at 24 bit then convert to 32 bit before processing, or record in 32 bit - whichever runs best on your equipment. This only applies to "processing" (applying equalisation, amplification, or any other effects). It does not apply to simple editing such as trimming the ends off or splitting tracks. 32bit recordings require more disk space than 24 bit (for the extra 1 byte per sample).
