Choosing and Configuring a Stereo Microphone Technique Based on Localisation Curves

Whenever the recording engineer uses stereo microphone techniques, he/she has
to consider a recording angle resulting from the positioning of microphones relative
to sound sources, besides other acoustic factors. The recording angle, the width of
a captured acoustic scene and the properties of a particular microphone technique
are closely related. We propose a decision supporting method, based on the mapping
of the actual position of a sound source to its position in the reproduced acoustic
scene. This research resulted in a set of localisation curves characterising four most
popular stereo microphone techniques. The curves were obtained by two methods:
calculation, based on appropriate engineering formulae, and experiment consisting
in the recording of sources and estimation of the perceived position in listening tests.
The analysis of curves brings several conclusions important in the recording practice.