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Re: [ARSCLIST] Stereo of recording of oral histories ?
I'm old-school in that I use a single dynamic mic on a table stand and with a piece of foam under
and in front of the mic. My questions are definitely off-mic compared to the answers but the answers
are what's important to me. I record to mono cassette. My brother is new-school and uses a Sony
single-point stereo mic and his Sony MD recorder. We had a fantastic 3-way conversation with an old
equipment industry warhorse over breakfast a couple of years ago and it never would have worked
without the stereo mic. I am not a fan of lavalier mics because most people don't know how to use
them and most people being interviewed figit and slosh around their clothes so you get lots of
scraping and muffling. Single omni on a table works OK and I had a blast doing one interview with an
old guy who has a fantastic mic collection, using an RCA mic in figure-of-8 pattern with me on one
side and him on the other.
In any situation with more than 2 people and anything less than a quiet room, I can see many
advantages in the single-point stereo approach and even with two people sitting at a table, it gives
a more deep, high and wide feeling of being there. The question is, do the words count most or does
the binaural feeling of being there count most, and does the feeling distract from the words? I
throw those questions out because I do not know the answers. Newsgathering folks will definitely say
the words count and want the mic in tight and words overpowering any environmental audio. Family
stuff is probably different because it's so personal and maybe 20 years from now what you really
want to hear are all the aural triggers of sitting in your father's kitchen.
One man's opinions ...
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <ArcLists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, January 07, 2006 1:24 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Stereo of recording of oral histories ?
How many people record oral histories in stereo?
I had an opportunity this past week to spend a day with my father who will be celebrating his 90th
birthday the end of the month. My wife and two boys and my dad's wife were all there - six of us.
As you know, I believe in redundancy in almost everything I do, so I had two mini-disc recorders
running through much of it. To keep things simple and totally independent, one MD was fed from an
Audio Technica AT-822 mic. The other was fed from a Sennheiser MD-421U mic in mono. I find the
AT-822 version to be much more intelligible than the MD-421 due to the spacial imaging as much as
anything.
I could have been more encumbered and used two AKG C-451s or two Sennheiser MKH-416Ts but that
would have required an external battery pack and more wires, and I was looking for something very
simple.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada http://www.richardhess.com/
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm