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Post by nobtwiddler on Jul 12, 2024 19:03:01 GMT -6
I dunno, Although I don't have the height option, just have W - X - Y. I just plug in my Josephson C700s into three channels of my console.
It captures everything I need, and affords options in post, with no hassle, and I'm done!
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Post by EmRR on Jul 13, 2024 7:19:38 GMT -6
I dunno, Although I don't have the height option, just have W - X - Y. I just plug in my Josephson C700s into three channels of my console. It captures everything I need, and affords options in post, with no hassle, and I'm done! It is certainly easier to drive!
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Post by andersmv on Jul 13, 2024 7:36:43 GMT -6
I dunno, Although I don't have the height option, just have W - X - Y. I just plug in my Josephson C700s into three channels of my console. It captures everything I need, and affords options in post, with no hassle, and I'm done! You're probably not missing that much most of the time unless you're going to use it for Dolby Atmos or something. I've always wanted to try the C700s, too right for my blood ![(rofl)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/rofl.png) .
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Post by andersmv on Jul 13, 2024 8:07:20 GMT -6
Thanks. I mostly see what's up now. Note that up/down is also a figure 8, and WXYZ in of themselves are also virtual encoded patterns, used as starting points for further manipulation. There's equalization going on each of the virtual B format patterns, I recall omni has some bass reduction and the others some boost, though I could have that backwards. Omni is I think -3 relative to others to compensate for the higher output of the four capsules. I like the resizing of polar patterns as one POV in this plug, giving an idea of the virtual blends. This plug is doing the same thing the others do, but showing it in a totally different and confusing way in that it's not showing the fully encoded polar patterns. It's essentially showing the "in-between" stage which other programs don't show. I wonder what the upscaling to higher order ambisonic trick might be. I don't see how that can really give better spatial definition, you really need the additional capsules to pull that off. On Blumlein, keep in mind MS with two figure 8 is the same outcome as Blumlein. If you're using 2 real 8's you can argue frequency with regards to on-axis makes the two a little different, here it's exactly the same because they are both virtual already. I tend to get Blumlein from MS 8's in many cases because the on-axis treble is pointed at the center, and you can vary width with less artifacts than you can with traditional 45 degree 8's, where the treble image starts to cancel and dull as they are panned toward each other. Looking at all the patterns shown in the Wes Dooley AES paper about MS is helpful in understanding what the blends create virtually. Pretty sure it's on the AEA site. I am curious about Harpex-X, which many in the past have said gives the best sounding processing, but it's pricey and I don't have that much need. Also claims to do some kind of upsampling to higher order virtual patterns. The Rode Soundfield plug has an option to make the virtual patterns be second order, which is sometimes useful, I recall the pattern range there is cardioid to short shotgun-ish, whereas the first order patterns are traditional omni through cardioid to 8. I had used the older SurroundZone2 plug, but haven't tried it recently. Final note on ambisonic usage - I stuck mine at instrument level in a classical guitar orchestra recently, which had close mics, an electric bass amp in the room, and overhead Blumlein and spaced AB omni pairs. Because coverage was so great already, the ambisonic proved best as a pair somewhere between hypercardioid and figure 8, pointed up at the ceiling for ambience, cancelling as much direct sound as possible. Who knew I'd dial that in?!?! I'll dig around for Wes's paper, sounds like a good read for me at this point. You're right as far as the omni/figure 8 decode, it's just like "real life". As far as the plugin being confusing, I had the opposite reaction (It made a lot of sense to me ![(rofl)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/rofl.png) ). Especially when you're using it and keeping everything ambisonic like it was intended, it's helped me get what i want quicker. When I did the mix of that bluegrass band around the mic in the first video, I wanted the main singer in the middle to be just a little louder in a few spots. I had to do a couple of weird things to pull that off originally (before I got the ab Imager plugin). It was SO quick and straight forward to pull her up more and make her more present. Pushing the Front/Back control towards more of a cardioid than figure 8 helped a lot, or just raising the omni level. Both great options in stereo. I've got head tracking working in the Dolby Atmos Renderer for my headphones now and have been messing with an Atmos mix of the bluegrass band (hopefully they'll be up for releasing it). It's really interesting decoding the mic to full Atmos and using the ab Imager to do something like push the singer up in the mix. If I push Front/Back towards a more cardioid pattern to the front towards the singer, I'm able to get her a bit louder as well as physically "push her forward" in the mix towards the front wall. When moving my head around, you get more of an exaggerated sense that the group is in a half circle around your sides and in front of you. If I start to push Omni more, I was able to pull the singer more to the "center" of the environment, almost like she was more in my head than in front of me, while still being able to rotate my head around and locate everyone else around me accurately. Both are really cool, I'm not sure how I'm going to go about it yet. I've done two mixes, one that's more accurate with her located in front of me and one where she's more centered and stays centered more when I move my head around. As far as upscaling, this is really new to me and I'll need to work with it more before I start to form any valid opinions or thoughts. I have talked with Alejandro a fair amount about upscaling though. Initial thoughts are that if you're just dumping this to stereo ultimately, I have not really found a difference (when listening to the stationary file in stereo on headphones or speakers) between staying in First Order and upscaling. I did one recording where I'm walking around the mic with a shaker. Taking that down to stereo and listening in headphones, I'm not able to perceive any difference or more accuracy. However, if you are going to use fully ambisonic plugins (like some compressors, EQ's and other processors that are able to process each ambisonic channel separately), I am able to get different results and more finely manipulate different areas and parts of the ambisonic signal. I can't tell you if it's going to be practically useful yet, but there is clearly a difference. It's a mixed bag on it being better or worse. When you start getting head tracking involved (either with the Audio Brewers Ambisonic head tracking, or doing it inside of Dolby Atmos with the external Dolby Renderer), that's when I've heard a clear difference with upscaling, even when taking the First Order tracks from the Soyuz mics and upscaling to Third Order (which is as high as I can go in ProTools Studio...). When I did my very first attempt at the live bluegrass band signal and messing with it in atmos, I kept it in First Order. After doing some aggressive processing with the imaging of the mic, there are definitely times where I would move my head around and when I got to the left side with the mandolin player, all of a sudden he would start to disappear and drop in level a little bit, then pop right back up. It's like there was a tiny dead spot in the image where he phased out. That was totally my fault, I'm learning here and was realizing that I was being a little too aggressive in some of my imaging moves. I dialed it back and the problem went away. When upscaling that ambisonic mic up to third order, then decoding the third order into atmos, it definitely sounds a little different (almost like the players got just a little farther away from me and the image was a bit bigger) but moving my head around felt much smoother with less dead spots. Once I got head tracking involved on headphones, I started to be more a believe in upscaling. It's still very much a mixed bag, and depending on what you're doing, sometimes staying down in First Order just works better. The only other consideration for upscaling is when you're taking additional microphones and using them to supplement the ambisonic mic (or vise versa). Especially in Dolby Atmos specifically, I'm hearing a difference. You can also take a mono signal, upscale it into an Ambisonic environment with the ab Imager, and move it around inside that ambisonic sphere. Upscaling to a higher order ambisonic environment and placing a mono mic around you sounds different inside of Dolby Atmos (on headphones) than just making the mono source an object or sending it right to the speaker bed and panning it around. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I'm able to head a difference. This is opening a whole other can of worms. My initial takeaways are that upscaling and using ambisonics, specifically in atmos, gives you another way to make things sound more spatial than just moving them around in the panner or as an object. Sometimes it sounds better to me, sometimes it doesn't. Moving forward, I'm going to try it a bunch of ways and just think of it as another tool until I get more experience and start to figure out when it works better or worse, and why. There are definitely situations where I've heard upscaling make an audible difference and improvement, but more than likely you're not going to hear that much of a difference when just dumping it down to stereo where everything is remaining stationary. Ask me again what I think in another year or so...
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Post by andersmv on Jul 30, 2024 8:58:29 GMT -6
I did my first "Atmos Thing" today. I've never really gotten into the idea of atmos for remixing stereo stuff, but I am starting to find a few things that are really amazing. We've all got to figure this crap out and get better at it. The thing that intrigues me is using Atmos for more acoustic based music to capture people performing something in the studio and find ways to put the listener in the room with the musicians. As far as live takes and things, I've tried this a few times in the past and didn't really get good results. No matter what I did, things just sounded a bit disjoined inside the atmos world, especially in the binaural headphone renders. I'm finally feeling like I'm getting over that hurdle now that I've got the Soyuz Ambisonic mic. It the first thing I've used where I can get close to feeling like I'm in a room and watching a performace. I love using the AEA R88 to capture things via a "one mic" style. I've gotten good at it and feel comfortable working that way. I set myself up playing guitar and singing with the R88, then added the ambisonic mic right next to it. The R88 is moved to the front of the image and spread out just a little bit into the height channels to make it a little bigger. That solidifies the performer and gives them a good spot in the room. The ambisonic mic is being converted to Atmos with the Audio Brewers plugin, so it's being sent to the bed as an accurate representation of the room. I added in some of that, a little bit of EQ and compression and that was it. The idea is to not overdo any of this, make it sound good but keep it fairly accurate and not overcooked. Again, this is a good first step. It's nice I can pull things off like this and be my own musical guinea pig to figure things out, but I definitely am ready to do this with better musicians and larger groups. Ideally, it would be awesome if this translates to larger group performances, but I have a feeling I might need to add some spot mics when there's more people to help wrap around the sides. We'll see, but I'm definitely hoping to do more of this! music.apple.com/us/album/so-im-told/1759364276?i=1759364277![](https://i.imgur.com/HUGEpYL.jpeg)
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