Taylorguitarman, I know you already picked up your mic, but for others seeking a stereo mic(s) for MD recording applications, I recommend checking out Chris Carfagno at
The Sound Professionals. He specializes in gear for MD recording. He's very helpful, quick to respond to emails, and his website has an excellent FAQ and live recording tips section.
I picked up a SP-CMC-4 and battery
module preamp (with bass rolloff and level control) back in 99'. The great thing about these mics is that they have interchangeable elements (hyper cardiod, cardiod, sub cardiod and omni). Additionally, it has optional powering/interface connections such as powering from a battery module or phantom power and interfacing to the recorder/preamp through 1/8th stereo mini or XLR (depends on which options you get $$$). I might add, the good thing about using an external power source is that you can bypass the typically poor mic preamp found on MD recorders (mic plugin power connection) and go straight to line in. For the battery module, I got the bass rolloff feature installed which allows me to set the cut at 16Hz (no roll-off), 69Hz, 95Hz, 107Hz, 160Hz, 195Hz, and 888Hz.
In comparison to the sony ECM's, I don't have any experience with them, but I can speak of their physical attributes vs the Sound Pros mic I got. The Sony is about the size of a hand held mic. The Sound Pros are slightly larger than the size of a lavalier mic. The Sony is convenient because of its single point stereo configuration. Just prop it on a mic stand via the supplied clip, aim it at the source and fire away. With the Sound Pros, you have to mount each mic (L/R) on a stereo T bar or something that it can clip on to. So in short, there's additional setup involved. However, I think the extra setup is worth it because I have more flexibility with my recordings ergo interchangeable elements, smaller in size allow stealthier recording (clip it on a pair of sunglass, baseball cap, shoulders etc.), preamp options...
I'm not so keen on the different stereo recording techniques (MS, XY, etc.) so please excuse my ignorance. I remember reading somewhere that you can achieve better stereo separation from having the mics spread further apart. I don't know what stereo technique that is nor do I know what, where or when to utilize it.
Perhaps someone can clarify that.
But what I do know is that with
the sony ECMMS957 while being able to select stereo pattern degrees, you are ultimately limited to MS. With the Sound Pro's mic you can more or less utilize all of the stereo techniques.
How do they sound? For starters, I get operation noise on acoustic sources using my Sony MZR90. I think that's inevitable with the built in preamps/line in inputs on MD units. Perhaps the current MD offerings have better preamp/line-in sections. Gotta love CEP/Audition for it's noise reduction tool. I can tell you this though, using the battery module/line in combo does reduce the background noise in comparison to direct connection to the mic input . But overall I am pretty happy with the recordings I've made with them. I think they tend to have a slightly dark and colored sound based on my recordings. So I usually had to EQ in post to open up the sound. But then again, my position from the source and the acoustics of the venues weren't ideal. I think that it also had something to do to with wrong bass rolloff settings. I haven't played around with it much. That's my fault, call it laziness. Gripes...aside from the inherent MD noise, to configure the bass rolloff settings, you have to configure a bank of dip switches (4 row). There's nothing intuitive about the settings, so I'd need to reference the manual (which I never had with me when I made the recordings). I wish it had a click pot for this function so I can sweep through the different frequencies.
This thread has gotten me re-interested in my "stealth" MD recording rig. I haven't used it since 2001. If anyone's interested, there's samples posted on the
Sound Professionals Website in the "Technical Info" section under "Sound Samples". Each section has a signal chain and recording environment description.
Cheers
