MS question

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foreverain4

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does anyone know, does Mid Side provide true left and right information? or is it just center with ambience left and right?
 
It provides true left and right, with a big null in the center, with a center mic covering the null. That's an important distinction, vs left and right meeting at the center, like an X/Y pair. So the desired result is as you stated in the second case. In reality, there will be some direct sound reaching the side lobes, and some ambience reaching the mid mic.
Really, the answer is yes, and yes.
 
Thread Hijack: When M/S recording, how do you reverb???

Do you just throw all 3 tracks to an aux bus with a reverb on it, or do the center and sides get treated differently???
 
I would either use a M-S decoder, or buss the three tracks to a pair of busses and send those to the reverb. Either way you'd be sending a stereo pair, not three signals.
 
Hang on just a sec...I'm still catchin' up here but, two mics in M/S right? One mic is set perpendicular to the sound source but it's a bidirectional...the second points at the sound source and it directional...two tracks...right?

Sorry...my interest is very peaked on this subject. I've been experimenting with this lately and frankly so far it sucks.

And what's this about a decoder? I thought that was way old school stuff. Awww...I'm so confused. :(
 
Two tracks, but the side mic (the one thats figure-of-8 pattern) is brought up on two separate channels, one of which has polarity inverted, and they are panned left and right. So, ultimately its three tracks total. A decoder just does the summing and differencing (is that a word?) for you so that you don't have to take up three channels on your board. You input a Mid signal and a Side signal, either directly from the mic pres during tracking or from your recorder during playback (which affords you the ability to adjust the width of the stereo signal after tracking), and it outputs a stereo Left and Right signal.

http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1349
 
Well there ya have it...that's why it sounds like crap for me! Thanks!

I've been doing one stereo + 1 track mono, one track mono + 1 track mono or both in stereo etc...all sound like crap!

Well, crap...now I know why it sounds like crap!


Thanks! :D
 
Read my second post in THIS thread. It should help to explain what is going on with MS micing.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
Light...you managed to fill in the blanks for me...thanks. I get the phase angle stuff. I work in the RF industry where we use phase angles to develop field gain at points where desired. I was having a tough time wrapping my brain around the "third" signal which really isn't...it's just the same signal with phase reversed to keep from nulling.

Cool...center the perpendicular signal until phase angles cancel each other out, flip the phase on either the left or right...sounds pretty plain but centered (I'm doing this as I go). Pretty easy to "wobble" the sound here...kinda touchy. Could be that my recording was done close mic'd. This is where I was going wrong before btw. Add the center channel and place it exactly in the middle.

Voila! room full-o-sound...pretty cool.

Wow...that really is cool...a little bit of tweaking on the horizontal balance goes a long ways. Pretty dramatic really.

Thanks Light.
 
M/S is great for mixing as you can dial in as much or as little room as you want where as no other stereo technique really gives you that ability. Most other techniques allow a larger or smaller image width, but not room. However, that is the downside of M/S, you can't really adjust the width like you can with a spaced pair.
 
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