ABSTRACT
To ease the learning curve with mic technique, I’ve so far only considered recording in mono. The fact remains, however, that anyone with two functioning ears hears the world in stereo, detecting the position of sound sources in a variety of ways. Any noise arriving from one side of the head will reach the nearer ear both earlier and at a higher level, for instance, and our hearing system has evolved to deduce a sound’s angle of arrival remarkably accurately based on that basic information. The vast majority of stereo recordings use this fact to generate their sound-positioning illusions, recreating the same kinds of inter-ear time and level differences for the listener via a pair of loudspeakers and headphones. It is possible to create such recordings using just a pair of mics confi gured in one of several traditional stereophonic arrays, and it’s these that I’d like to explore in this chapter.
