This should be required viewing for anyone who ever gets up and does karaoke! Some of the singers used to drive me nuts and would accuse me of making them sound bad when most of it was microphone handling technique on their part.
You're a very brave man Berry. People can be extremely passionate and opinionated about mic technics. Now a question. To what drgree do you think the proximity effect might be reversed by the distance between the listener and the speaker? We've all heard recordings where if you listen from an unrealistically short distance from the speaker or at a higher volume than what properly sizes the vocalist in the soundstage. you can hear every little thing that happens in their mouth. I think normal field listening should remove just the right amount of that
Sure, speaker placement and the environment can have a large impact on the reproduction. It's also of course somewhat dependent upon the loudspeakers used, hence some speakers are better than others for near field monitoring. I use an RTA to check if my listening environment approaches reasonably flat response and then I adjust placement or maybe EQ to taste. One radical solution would be omnidirectional speakers, but there are few that are actually really good. I have a vintage pair of Domus Mirage (omni) loudspeakers which do not have this proximity issue, and they sound pretty good no matter where you are in the room, but they also have other constraints such as requiring a large space without nearby walls to operate well. They're also so smooth and laid back sounding that they make just about everything sound good, even lousy mixes, so I don't find them useful for mixing.
Great video. I use the Heil PR-40 along with other processing with ham radio. Microphone location is a big part of sound.
This should be required viewing for anyone who ever gets up and does karaoke! Some of the singers used to drive me nuts and would accuse me of making them sound bad when most of it was microphone handling technique on their part.
You're a very brave man Berry. People can be extremely passionate and opinionated about mic technics. Now a question. To what drgree do you think the proximity effect might be reversed by the distance between the listener and the speaker? We've all heard recordings where if you listen from an unrealistically short distance from the speaker or at a higher volume than what properly sizes the vocalist in the soundstage. you can hear every little thing that happens in their mouth. I think normal field listening should remove just the right amount of that
Sure, speaker placement and the environment can have a large impact on the reproduction. It's also of course somewhat dependent upon the loudspeakers used, hence some speakers are better than others for near field monitoring. I use an RTA to check if my listening environment approaches reasonably flat response and then I adjust placement or maybe EQ to taste.
One radical solution would be omnidirectional speakers, but there are few that are actually really good. I have a vintage pair of Domus Mirage (omni) loudspeakers which do not have this proximity issue, and they sound pretty good no matter where you are in the room, but they also have other constraints such as requiring a large space without nearby walls to operate well. They're also so smooth and laid back sounding that they make just about everything sound good, even lousy mixes, so I don't find them useful for mixing.