The directional characteristics are mostly due to the speakers' and human head's size relative to the wavelengths involved. I do take that into consideration, generally by panning instruments with a lot of LF content to the center. A bass management tool can bring the lows to the center if a LF instrument is panned.
For single point overhead I generally find X-Y to be more convenient, but I did recently use M-S to capture the whole kit from the front, 3' out from the kick and about 4' off the ground. Worked great. And, no, you don't have to record three tracks. Duplicating/inverting digitally is exactly analogous to a Y-cable with pins 2 and 3 swapped on one output.
There's not a whole lot of difference between monitoring a mono signal through one or two speakers. High and low frequencies sum differently, but I generally do the one speaker thing only a little at the beginning and once or twice during the mix. It's somewhat useful but not critical.
Thanks to "Boulder Sound Guy" and "Farview" for the replies. I would be glad to have any misapprehension of mine corrected, particularly one as inconvenient as this - there is considerable stuffing around involved if you want to encode/decode m/s in the analog domain.
Firstly, when I'm forced into low overheads by ceiling height I mostly use x/y as well, and coincidentally (no pun intended) I have also used the out-front M/S technique you described with excellent results. As overheads I have to say M/S is a bit messy - seems to me that you need a bit more distance and a larger soundstage for M/S to come into its own.
On M/S decoding: I was advised by a crusty old experienced audio guy (the first person I worked for actually) that "ya can't do it digitally - it doesn't work". Now I always assumed that this was because once you are working with a digitised waveform, the phase relationships of particularly the very high frequencies might be effected by a certain amount of aliasing or step/squarewave degradation (Now I examine my thinking and I realise that even splitting and flipping before recording to digital still results in two digitised waveforms, so there goes that thread of logic - AND we are also talking about the signal from a single mic capsule for the "side" component, so it shouldn't matter anyway - right? Alan Blumlein's techniques have always tied my head in knots...). Anyway, since reading the two posts after mine, I have tried to find some reference on the web to problems with M/S in the digital domain, and I haven't seen one yet. So, has anyone else ever heard of this? (perhaps I should ask this question as the subject of an entire thread)
BTW, I have done M/S decodes in the digital domain, and it seemed to work for the most part - however I did think that the directionality of the high frequencies was a little less convincing (but perhaps I was expecting this and therefore that's what I heard).
I should have been more clear (particularly considering the shitfight that was going on here a few days ago) - I was talking about checking the phase of multiple mics on single sources (like what happens to kick when the snare bottom mic is introduced). I do a lot of checking for phase cancellation on drum recordings. I just thought it was "proper" to do it with one speaker.
Incidentally, the reason I started banging on here about M/S is due to the mono compatibility aspect of the technique. To digress further, are there any film sound people here? I understand that there are some differences of opinion as to how an M/S stereo matrix translates when introduced into Dolby surround encoding/decoding for film - anyone want to dive into that murky bog for us?
Cheers,
Brent
(Actually it was also covered pretty well in another similar 'bass thread just a few days ago anywho.
