Klover Parabolic Mic Dishes -- You know you want one...

Great job Ty- that's awesome! Nice to hear a parabolic coupled with a high-end mic.

Far field recording opens up more recording possibilities and parabolic dishes with quality mics are just the beginning. Multi-mic array systems are also becoming more impressive (for board room meetings etc.). AI-boosted audio filtering will provide ultra clean far-field recording in the near future: https://towardsdatascience.com/can-you-hear-me-now-far-field-voice-475298ae1fd3
 
Thanks, JCS,

I suspect you're right. The EQ I tossed up in Pro Tools was pretty basic. The Schoeps obviusly sounded smoother than the 45060 or MKE2, but Chris Countryman's EQ job on the B3 was very good.

Regards,

Ty Ford
 
In the same way an interference tube is physically tuned, perhaps you could come up with an EQ for each dish+mic combo to quickly provide good results. Perhaps recording simultaneously in a quiet space with a near field mic and a fair field mic (parabolic) so you can compute a spectral transform to convert one into the other (e.g. doing an FFT for both and adjusting the spectral levels until they match. This can be done with code or by ear with the appropriate tools). A more complicated solution could use a recurrent neural network to deal with both spectrum and phase.

This is a lot harder problem, and the quality is already pretty good (2016 video):

Machine learning can be used remove audio artifacts, reflections, phasing, and match EQ.
 
Canford audio in the UK sold the Little Ears and Big Ears parabolic mics for quite a long time - with sport broadcasters using them in the main. They are no longer manufactured and they now sell the Klovers at two thousand pounds. The ones I used on the football pitches don't perform like the one inside - there is a huge difference between indoors and outdoors. The reflections from one voice, from walls and hard surfaces is very different from outside with different sounds coming from every direction. They certainly work, but the desk needs to roll off the bottom end because the narrow band is pretty wide below 500Hz. As the frequency rises, the dish focusses it much more narrowly. The hub-bub in a sports ground needs removing for them to do their job properly. Before the Big Ears came along with a dish you could see through, pointing the damn things was a bit hit and miss. I remember my first dish was in the 70s - using the British Grampian DP4 omni. I've never had a chance to compare a long shotgun like the Sennheiser 816 against a dish. I've used both but never at the same time. I did experience the use of two 2m dishes across a 200-300m distance - across a lake. We jury rigged a Yamaha NS10 driver to one, and a Beyer M58 omni mic at the other end. For voice it worked astoundingly - real clarity. Trying out with music was pretty awful - thin and very bright and edgy - actually quite like when that shoeps was plonked into the Klover. I'm pretty sure that when doing distance capture is sorted it will be by multiple mics and clever electronics and not via dishes.
 
Hi Paul,

What sort of indoors may indeed make a difference. WHen I heard the 26" on the floor at NAB, there was a low level sound of all the noise in the room that reminded me of the "underwater" artifact one hears when using some noise reduction software. Granted, that was in a huge room with sound coming in from everywhere. I wonder what might be done if the sound were more unified and coming from a stage, like a symphony orchestra, or what lining changes to the dish might help in addition to the AI covered in JCS' posts.
 
They make good shields for sports that have a fast moving small ball, we've lost a few from lacrosse balls but saved injury by their sacrifice. But because of the way they reflectors focus the different frequencies, I'd never consider them for high quality work. At the time I was doing this stuff, we were using ECM 55 most of the time, once in a while some other type of lav mic in a tube. But we have used 635a up to SM58 and the bigger diaphragm never really made much difference.
 
I think the difference will come in when mics are designed with specific frequency responses. The 9" dish for example, uses a specially EQed Countryman B3. It sounded the most natural of them all.

Regards,

Ty Ford
 
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