One of the best-sounding recordings I've heard in the last few years is Handel's Messiah performed by Jeffrey Thomas and the American Bach Soloists (Delos DE-3360 CD). The sound is spectacularly natural, with realistic dynamics and a wonderful sense of space. If you haven't heard it, I recommend it highly—but Millennia Music & Media Systems is now offering you a chance to experience the recording on a completely different level.
Initiating an ongoing series of discussions on the complexities of orchestral recording, it has posted a tutorial that offers comparisons of seven microphone passages from the recording—each demonstrating a two-channel purist approach and a multi-microphone mix.
Millennia's John Grou commented, "The debate over 'pure' stereo orchestral recording versus multi-microphone mixes has raged for decades. Here's a rare opportunity to hear both simultaneously as a controlled experiment."
Many audiophiles are convinced that a purist two-microphone approach is the way to best capture the undoctored sound of live acoustic music. I believed that myself before I had any experience with recording music. The more I listened to raw two-channel data at recording venues and then compared that to the mixes of four, six, and even eight microphones that John Atkinson ended up using for his Stereophile recordings, the more convinced I became that there's an art to creating natural-sounding recordings that is quite distinct from simply capturing the sound.
Not everyone agrees, of course, so that's why Millennia's tutorial is so welcome. It's illuminating to compare two-microphone feeds with identical passages from multimicrophone arrays.
I'm already looking forward to the second installment, which Grou teasingly suggests might be about surround sound recording.
