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News Details
| A report from Polyhymnia's recording session | May 1, 2004 |
| At the beginning of April, thanks to some contacts from this website, I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days with Polyhymnia's recording team during the recording session in Watford Town Hall for a new SACD from Telarc. It was a very exciting opportunity to see how all those fantastic recordings were made and hear first hand about Polyhymnia (http://www.polyhymnia.nl/) from the company’s director Everett Porter, who was the balance engineer, and his assistant, Jean-Marie Geijsen. It wasn't a big surprise to learn during these sessions that the simplicity of approach is the 'secret' of Porter's successful recording career. He, on the other hand, hardly keeps his work secretive, always very keen to explain all aspects of his work and tell all about Polyhymnia's custom-made electronics, cables or microphone positioning. A good recording starts with a good recording venue, and one of Porter's favourites is Watford's Town Hall in north-west London. Many admirable surround recordings in the 70's made there are being revived through Pentatone’s RQR series, but to achieve such a life-like presence and space/air around the sounds of the instruments requires some clever (but basically simple) microphone placing.
It works like this: most of the sound we hear in the final edit is picked up by 5 main microphones (omnidirectional Shoeps MK2S with Polyhymnia's custom electronics). Three of them (front left and right and centre) are positioned well above the orchestra (some 3 and a half meters) and the two surround channels are picked up by 2 more mics facing back of the hall at the same height. The signals from those mics are led through a set of Van den Hul cables (again custom made), into Polyhymia's own microphone preamps straight onto hard disk (after, of course, DSD A/D conversion) without mixing, compression or any other signal processing. Thus the dynamic range and orchestral transparency are preserved as they are in natural concert hall acoustics.
Polyhymnia uses "Merging Technologies Pyramix Virtual Studio" as the recording editor, with capabilities to record up to 8 separate channels. Since the 5 channels are used by 5 unprocessed main microphone’s signals, the other 3 are mixed 'live' during the recording from the spot mics placed throughout the orchestra. If there is a need for using those signals, they never go above -20 db in the final mix, as they might interfere with the natural depth and space created by the 5 main mics. The mixing console is a modified Studer 962, and the monitor speakers are five B&W Nautilus 803s. The monitoring of the recording itself is usually done in stereo mode for the simple reason that when a realistic sound perspective is achieved using only 2 channels, adding on surround can only improve it.
If it sounds pretty simple, well, to be honest, it is. In my discussions with Mr. Porter I've learned that Polyhymnia's success is based on simplicity of approach to microphone positioning and recording procedures. The less involvement from the technical crew, the better. Without any desire to add more fuel on the already fiery discussion about too close or not too close, microphone positioning is entirely personal choice of a balance engineer. From what I saw recently at Watford Town Hall, that is just a part of the complete (sonic) picture, but at the same time a significant one. Good recording teams know well the characteristics of the microphones they use, and the decision on how far or how close they should be put in front of the orchestra depends solely on that, not on where the hypothetic listener will be sitting and listening. And the ideal seat in the concert hall would actually be one that doesn’t exist - a tennis umpire's chair placed relatively close to the orchestra – it doesn't have the problem of the first row seats in a concert hall (weird balance), isn't as close and surrounded as the conductors position, and gives all instruments a basically unobstructed path to the listener. Likewise, orchestral transparency and experience of natural orchestral depth and perspective in a recording can be better achieved from above the orchestra, in Porter's words: "mic height vs distance is one way we adjust the perspective within the orchestra. Generally speaking, the lower we go, the closer the front of the orchestra is relative to the back of the orchestra. Higher also gives more acoustic - as does farther away."
With all that in mind, and in good natural acoustics, the results speak for themselves, Everett Porter signed the recordings we all admire here: Liszt: Dante Symphony, Tasso - Botstein and Gliere: Symphony No. 3 - Botstein to name just two. Music recorded this time was the first ever recording of Gavril Popov's Symphony no. 1 op. 7 (written in 1934, Russia) conducted by Leon Botstein with London Symphony Orchestra. The piece itself is a bizarre mix of Shostakovich, Wagner and few other late romantics, and it is loud (and I mean really loud) and dense. Music like that truly requires this kind of simplistic recording approach in preserving rich orchestral textures and colours. Uncompressed dynamics also play a vital role in preserving authentic orchestral sound, and the LSO were playing their hearts out. Having the opportunity to hear this recording in direct comparison to a real orchestral sound was a revelation – depending on where one is sitting in the concert hall, it can actually sound better than the real thing. Focus of many solo instruments is precise and never obstructed, percussions are sharp and clear, and the massive corpus of strings has rich and full tonal quality with separate groups clearly distinguished. Another showcase recording from Polyhymnia and Telarc to look forward to. Nesh Petrovic-Reid (one half of 'beardawgs') |
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