What's Spinning

Some of the old Columbias, like this one, sound really good. A few too many microphones, not as many as the bajillion that Deutsche Grammaphon employed at times, but clean and dynamic.
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It depends on what the point of all the mics is. A concert hall is not an acoustically perfect space (at least not in the terms of the standard audiophile where you are trying to capture the sound as recorded.)

When Yo-Yo Ma made Inspired by Bach, he made these accompanying films. For the second Cello Suite, he wanted to recreate the music as it would sound if played in Piranesi’s Prison of the Imagination. So he travelled to a church built by Piranesi and they put hundreds of microphones in various places in this very ornate worship room to recreate the reverberations of the cavernous places in the etchings. It really is a very cool recording.
 
It depends on what the point of all the mics is. A concert hall is not an acoustically perfect space (at least not in the terms of the standard audiophile where you are trying to capture the sound as recorded.)

When Yo-Yo Ma made Inspired by Bach, he made these accompanying films. For the second Cello Suite, he wanted to recreate the music as it would sound if played in Piranesi’s Prison of the Imagination. So he travelled to a church built by Piranesi and they put hundreds of microphones in various places in this very ornate worship room to recreate the reverberations of the cavernous places in the etchings. It really is a very cool recording.
Yo-Yo Ma and his producers were going for a very specific sound, obviously. I haven’t heard this work but would like to as I love the Bach Cello Suites. My favorite version is the Mercury Living Presence recordings with Janos Starker from 1965-1968 which utilized just three mics.

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