EmRR

Comparing a few similar spots, on first impression, the lows seem to image more in the center with the Neumann, and slightly more with the corresponding highs with the Sennheiser. That may entirely be pre-bias on my part.

Consider the Pearl and Milab mics that have rectangular capsules, which have different patterns vertical versus horizontal. The same is true for ribbons. The differences with both relate to off-axis sound pickup. Anything on axis 0º will sound the same with either orientation, it's the sound of 90º/etc that's going to change.

RIP, what a thing he did.

Great, thanks. Yes, I did sniff a bit of that little clear bottle as a kid.....and built some Godzilla models!

Asking as I encountered someone who was using the grommeted sides of two BBG's, taped together, to make something that would cover a pair of Sennheiser MKH 800's for DMS or Blumlien use. It struck me one could possibly use a single BBG and mount a second grommet, and I wonder how treacherous an operation that might be. I don't know what happens when you pierce the internal fabric, nor how fragile the frame is under cutting pressure, getting the grommet mounted, etc. I'm told Rycote won't sell a version like this, likely doesn't meet their desired protection spec. You could of course do this with a standard longer mono windscreen, but I'm thinking about something with a smaller visual footprint that wouldn't require another specialized conn box. Thanks for any thoughts.

RIP, Allen. Great work.

RIP Don, glad you are remembered.

Yes! That’s what I mean!

Maintenance with anything like this is best applied as a ground up rebuild, if you really want to use it and have reliability. Do that comprehensive rebuild before installing, then it's not hard from then on. I've countless pieces from the 1940's and 1950's I rebuilt right away, which have run flawlessly for two decades since. Nice pics guys! Looks like they used to have sort of the right stuff in there before the changeover.

This ^. Maybe not by much, but it really doesn't matter. It really didn't matter going to vinyl. The capture and distribution mediums were always the bottleneck. I have a friend who's restored 1930 era RCA and Western Electric film sound capture systems, and their direct output sounds thoroughly modern. Anything with multiple audio transformers in series (probably 4 minimum here) will be band limited to a degree. Many will also have 'air' presence bumps in the 15K-20K range from transformer resonances, so upper treble is frequently the most boosted portion. I make records with 1930's and 1940's tube preamps and ribbon mics on a regular basis, and no one ever complains about limited bandwidth. This console certainly should exceed a lot of what I use. I also run an early 1950's RCA BC-2B console that I restored, it's manual states +/-1.5dB 30-15K, and it beats that according to Spectrafoo Complete and an Audio Precision test set. The problem with a console like this (outside of maintenance) is the very limited set of routing and control options. There are studios that exist purely in that niche market, selling nostalgia, and some are busy.

Sorry to hear.

Nice, thanks.

Oh yeah. I do a (normally) healthy amount of corporate meetings per year, and it's REALLY hard to imagine the old way of rotating 8-10 lavs over 15-30 non-actors per day is going to be met with any comfort at all. People who wear a lav in a large meeting 1-2 times a year, and don't know how to position it themselves, require dressing.

I've done a bunch of DMS and horizontal array recordings with MKH30's, MKH20, and MKH800 Twin. That might be as 'apples to apples' as you can get in terms of sound comparison. Both work well. My only observation is in the processing, there may be a DMS option I haven't found, something beside the Schoeps which is EQ'd for their specific mics. With any of the ambisonics processors, you can rotate the 0º orientation, I don't see that with DMS, and it should be possible. Depending on what you are recording, that may not matter at all.

Ugh, need to do that.....no good feels here.

^ yep

36 cancelled live event days so far. I didn't know I'd be home in March at all.......

Oh no!

Agreed with finding a clean version of the same material. You likely won't achieve much easily or inexpensively with the various forensic repair softwares like RX7.

We recently had an LCD monitor start spraying RF causing wireless dropouts, which didn't show up in scans. Found it the old fashioned way, turning things on and off one at a time.

I'd focus on main image with mono compatible stereo placement of the MKH 50's, then add some number of the RE 50's as spot mics assuming you can multitrack and see how they are (or are not) useful in post.

I don't know if iMovie has gotten any better, for a long time it continually got worse so far as what you could and couldn't do.

Very sorry to hear Jeff. Rest in peace Don!

Thanks for sharing these memories.

I’d still like to hear about 435 versus 406 versus 416.......