Ethan Winer

Brandon, Very similar. This is usually what you want for vocal recording. It's easy to add ambience electronically when mixing, but impossible to remove room tone after the fact. Also, room tone is usually resonant, meaning some frequencies are emphasized unnaturally more than other frequencies. A decent reverb plug-in with a small room type preset has a better ambience quality because it's not frequency selective as most rooms are. You bet. Go to the Products page of the RealTraps site, and you can see all sorts of information. There's a link from there to our Videos page with a very basic "slide show" video demo. --Ethan

Phil, I haven't tried that one but it looks like it at least has foam on the inside. This is IMO the main problem with the SE device. It is not absorbent, so the curved surface is a big focusing reflector, which is what causes the affected sound. --Ethan

Man, that thing sure is ugly compared to the Reflexion Filter! Hey, which do you prefer - shiny chrome or works good? We tried that and then it sounded even more affected and colored. The video's audio is compressed, as are all online videos. But the main change in quality is the absence of room tone. Listen again, and directly on-axis with your loudspeaker tweeters (or use headphones). There's always some slight coloration with a microphone in close proximity to anything, even perfect absorption. The change would be less with an omnidirectional microphone because the sound that no longer gets into the rear of the mike has the same response as the sound that still gets into the front. With a cardioid mike like my partner's Neumann, the sound that had been bouncing off the walls, but was removed with our PVB, had a different quality than what arrives at the front. This is why I posted graphs showing how much less affected the sound is with our Portable Vocal Booth compared to the SE device. For those graphs I used a precision DPA omni measuring microphone. Thanks for all the comments, and especially thanks to Phil for posting this. --Ethan

Glenn, You can absolutely make a high fidelity preamp using tubes! But solid state can be clean and smooth too, so why even bother with tubes that age and change their sound over time etc? That's my story and I'm sticking with it! --Ethan

Glenn, "Toob" is simply my way of dissing the notion that this antique technology is somehow superior to more modern circuitry. I do like a good tube guitar amp though! But there you want the distortion. --Ethan

James, Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. All the time I see people post problems with some copy protected software they bought. I always want to answer, "So return it and buy something else that's not protected." --Ethan

Danny, In that case, assuming there's bass and drums etc in the tune, I'd go for a more close-miked sound. Try a few places within two feet of the front of the cello, and pick the one that sounds least colored and affected. Or put up two or three mikes, record them all, and decide during mixing which seems to blend better with the track. Again, put the cello as far away as you can from reflective walls. Different frequencies radiate in different directions. This article on the Sound on Sound site has a drawing in the sidebar about 3/4 of the way down the page: www.soundonsound.com/sos/may06/articles/recordingstrings.htm --Ethan

Danny, Carpet is really poor acoustic treatment. But if that's all you can manage then so be it. It will be better than nothing. Exactly. And put the cello as far from the walls as you can to avoid a boxy sound. A clear sound free of room tone or other coloration. I suggested the AT2020 because most of the other mikes you listed are dynamic. Is it solo cello? Cello and piano? Cello as an overdub to a pop tune? Context matters! --Ethan

Danny, Much more important than which mike you use is the sound of the room you record in, and how far away the cello and the mikes are from reflective surfaces. A good condenser mike like the AT2020 should do a stellar job in a good room. Or will you be recording in an auditorium? Skip the toob nonsense and just aim to capture the cleanest signal you can. You can always dirty it up later, though I can't imagine why you'd want to! If the cello is as good as you imply, you probably won't need any EQ. But don't make the mistake of putting the mikes too close. Cellos (and violins etc) radiate different frequency ranges in different directions. So you need to be far enough back to capture all of it. My home studio is large - 33 by 18 feet with a 12 foot ceiling at the peak - and I get a great cello sound with an X/Y pair of AT4033 mikes about four feet in front of the cello. Note that this is not how I recorded my cello for the Rondo video. In that case I wanted a close-miked pop music sound, so I put one mike about a foot away from the top of the fingerboard. I hope this helps! --Ethan