Innocent Ear

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Coincident figure of 8's angled at 90 degrees

        This is perhaps the best known of all single point microphone techniques. Almost every engineer has at least heard of a 'Blumlein pair,' as crossed figure-of-eights (NOT cardioids as some mistakenly believe) at 90 degrees are commonly known, even though  Blumlein himself patented other techniques which are described above. It comprises two figure of 8 microphones, one on top of the other to make the capsules as coincident as possible, angled at 90 degrees to each other. 

This technique has produced many famous recordings (such as Beecham's Scheherazade mentioned above) and is tried and trusted. It is arguably the most objective of all microphone techniques in that a listener can judge the position of the instruments from the microphones with similar accuracy as he / she can in a live situation. It also has very sharp and accurate imaging, a wonderful sense of depth and a very uniform spread of reverberation across the sound stage. This last characteristic allows the engineer to use this technique even when recording a single small instrument such as the guitar. The guitar will sound exactly from where it was placed in relation to the microphones, but the reverberation will occupy the entire sound stage. It is one of the most realistic stereo microphone techniques known to man.

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