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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JULY 2008: For six hot days in June, hundreds of
avant-garde jazz enthusiasts packed the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center
in Manhattan for the 13th annual Vision Festival.
All of the best and
brightest avant-garde jazz musicians and groups performed to the eager
throng, and Stefan Heger, audio renaissance man and chief engineer at
Cologne's Supow Studio, was on hand to record it all in full surround sound.
He relied on just one microphone for the surround signal, a SoundField MKV,
which possesses the unique ability to capture spatial information with a
proprietary signal. The spatial characteristics of the surround sound can
then be altered during mixdown, in contrast to conventional microphone
techniques, which permanently imprint their spatial information at the time
of recording.
Having the ability to make changes after the fact was a huge advantage for
Heger at Vision Festival. With five acts performing every night - thirty in
all - some with just a few members, and some crowding the stage to an
uncomfortable degree, it was impossible to find just one mic setup that
would properly captures every act. On top of that, the avant-garde musicians
had no compunction against switching their locations on stage or adding a
member - or forty! - at the last minute, rendering any careful mic placement
Heger decided on during rehearsal useless.
In the six previous years that Heger has recorded Vision Festival, he has
tried all manner of microphone techniques to properly capture each act.
However, the fixed nature of all conventional microphone inevitably would
leave some acts sounding too small and some too large and most imperfect in
other ways as well. With its specialized preamp, the SoundField MKV system
delivers four channels of information about sound arriving at the
multi-capsule microphone: its front-back location (X), its side-side
location (Y), its vertical location (Z), and its absolute reference pressure
(W).
Using SoundField's Surround Zone software with the four channels of
information during mixdown allowed Heger to change every aspect of the
imaging. If the musicians were "lopsided" on the stage, Heger could
re-center the stereo image. He could change the virtual location of the
microphone to emphasize certain instruments. He could change the width of the stereo or surround field to accommodate more or fewer musicians. For this year's Vision Festival, Heger flew the SoundField MKV above the stage a reasonable distance back. No adjustments at the time of recording were
necessary.
"The ability to change the mic position during mixdown has many advantages,"
said Heger. "I can bring things closer to the listener without losing
fidelity or introducing odd spatial artifacts. And the sound of the
microphone, apart from its spatial ability, is clear, deep, open and
wonderfully transparent. There's no coloration. During the performances,
Heger usually monitored with a Dangerous D-Box using the preamp's stereo
output and printed the four channels of information to his computer using an
Apogee AD16x converter. The fact that the SoundField system required no
adjustment during the recording allowed him to focus on the sound and
placement of numerous spot mics.
William Parker and a handful of 'top-of-the-genre' musicians closed out the
festival with a forty-members youth choir crowding the stage! "If I had been
using anything other than the SoundField, it would have been a disaster,"
said Heger. "I wouldn't have been able to adjust the mics at the last minute
and the pickup would have been totally inappropriate. But with the
SoundField, it was no problem."
The many hours of recordings will have many fates. Apart from an archive of
the event, the Vision Festival organizers have often put out compilations of
the event on DVD with surround sound, which is likely to happen this year as
well. In addition, individual musicians purchase, mix, and publish their
tracks. "With SoundField's four-channel 'B-format' signal, musicians and
engineers who have never touched the microphone will become acquainted with
what it can do," said Heger. "I give them tracks labeled 'X' 'Y' 'Z' and 'W'
and it generates interest. Using the software, they'll come to understand
the power of the technique."
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