Testing Surround Sound Setups

andrewscorgie
May 12, 2017
1 min read

Todays aim was to go through the process of setting up a surround sound microphone setup and then record a musical source with it.

For this, myself, Tasha and Matthew moved into the large tv studio space to attempt two surround sound techniques.

The first being the Fukada Tree, which involves 7 Microphones. consisting as follows;

4 mics in a square 2 metres apart from each other in a cardioid pattern, with each mic pointing outwards at a 45deg angle.

A front centre mic, 1 metre in front of the font Left/right pair placed to the front in cardioid pattern and two side mics, in line with front left/right 1 metre apart from them set to an omni pattern (this pair is used to blend the sound for both front and rear.

The second setup attempted, was the Hamasaki square, an ambient array setup to pick up the ambient sound of the room.

The setup involved for this technique has similarities to the Fukada in that it uses the same square grid, but where it differs is, it uses a total of 4 mics, and they are all set to a Fig 8 pattern.

The time spent in the tv studio space working on these setups was good preparation for understanding what is involved in the whole setup process, in particular the microphone placement and having the mesurements for distances correct, how the mobile setup works in regard to using the Sapphire PreAmp with Macbook, as on Tuesday the 16th we will be doing this again for real with a vocal choir in Edinburgh.