Peter, one question:
Close mics of instruments - they contain early reflections that tell our brain that the instrument in question is not very far away from us as listener, right?
When we add Berlin Studio to such an instrument, won’t the instrument’s “close mic ERs“ mean our brain is perceiving the resulting sound as “not quite right”?
Hope it’s understandable!
That is actually what the delay(s) in the plugin are/were meant for. Especially the one in the dry input channel.
There is an approach used by a number of classical recording engineers:
- Use overall microphone sets, like the Decca Tree, or what you often see in concert halls hanging from the ceiling: an AB-Pair
- But also use spot mics at low levels
- Delay the sound of these spot mics with a time equivalent to the instance to the center Decca microphone
- This merges the sounds from the spot mics and the global mics and in the case of samples also puts early reflections back in a correct range
What it also does is - I discovered more recently - is smoothen the transients contained in the dry signal (!), and making them more distant by the EQ effect this has.
For woodwinds, for instance, if I remember well, that delay of the dry signal should be around 18 msec.
My intention is to include an auto-align option in a future version that does this automatically. I have calculated all time delays and thus distances for the stage positions.
This will be done, not by delaying the direct sound, but by skipping all the IR samples until the first significant sound in the Decca center. Meaning that the dry sound will still play immediately, but the global mics start "earlier". I find this very effective and have used it in all my current demos on the Samplicity site.
When we work with samples, there will be no more subtle break between the dry sound, its early reflections and what the global mics pick up.
In this first release I personally find the delays confusing, maybe they should go out, because people may not understand their short range (which is already equivalent to more than the studio's depth). It is different from pre-delays in regular reverbs, this is for such subtle time alignments.
To come back to your question about our perception, if you would look at the IRs from the Decca for the woodwinds, you would see that the ERs start later, after a near silence. Using a sample where the ERs start right away is in theory (and in my view) indeed not the best option, but I am not sure if many people would notice... A nerdy person, like me :-D would experiment with this delay stuff...
A very good topic, that will certainly make it into a blog post, that I hope to be able to write...
Programming can nearly be put aside for a while, then the site and shop need a good update, support with ticketing, FAQ etc, advertizing and then good documentation. Because who reads manuals?
Cheers
.
