Though he's had numerous live concert recordings broadcast on 90.7 WMFE-FM's weekly Central Florida in Concert series, only recently was the program's audio producer, Michael Morgan, able to capture the ears of National Public Radio's "Performance Today" engineers.


On May 18, 28 and 29, NPR broadcast two pieces with pianist Leon Bates that Morgan recorded in early March at The Bach Festival held in the 10,000 square foot great nave of Knowles Memorial Chapel on the campus of Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. Morgan, who is also a freelance audio engineer and opera and recital vocalist, attributes at least part of the "break-through" success of his submission to Performance Today to his recent acquisition of a pair of DPA microphones: the DPA 3532-S stereo kit, consisting of two 4041-S solid-state large diaphragm mics.



"I had the opportunity to record Mendelssohn's Elijah, with full orchestra, chorus, and soloists," says Morgan, "a solo piano recital [Leon Bates], the Bach Double Piano Concerto, and one of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos. For all these recordings, I used the same pair of microphones - the DPA 3532-S. Try doing that with your favorite mic!"

Miking the Steinway
For the Bates' piano recital, Morgan found his challenge in miking the nine-foot Steinway concert grand. "Capturing a coherent piano sound along with the instrument's room decay required some experimentation," he says. He mounted the mics on the stereo bar, six feet from the piano into the hall, and twelve feet above the stage. "The microphone heads were located on the same plane as the fully opened piano lid, resulting in the lid being removed from the sonic equation, and a perfect balance between the piano and the room."



Morgan describes the greatest strength of the 4041-S - which is how the DPA designates the mic in the singular - as being its extremely revealing nature. "It takes much less time to find the right 'spot' with this mic. You can easily hear the difference a movement of a few inches in placement makes," he says. "Some engineers rely on the same mic placement for every session, trying to eliminate time-consuming experimentation during setup. But the 4041-S makes experimentation of this nature easy and enjoyable."



The 4 - 6dB soft boost of the 4041 between 8khz and 16khz allows the microphone to be used, "like a precision surgical instrument," says Morgan. "Though the mic is an omni, the high frequency boost lobe is not completely omni-directional, so positioning the lobe towards the desired area allows instruments or voices to be highlighted without losing the rest of the ensemble or acoustic environment. You can achieve this with multiple microphones, but usually at the cost of phasing and response problems. The forward illumination of the soloist or soloists seems to be typical of many classical recordings, so typical in fact that a more naturally balanced recording may seem undernourished or lacking, even to fairly sophisticated listeners of classical recorded music. While acoustical recording space plays a major role in this, microphone type and placement play an even larger one."

On job with Bösendorfer


The Westin Grand Bohemian Hotel (Orlando, FL) Mike Morgan with Full-Sail Recording student, Ben Luton. Morgan was asked to record the inaugural concert in a planned series of chamber music performances sponsored by the new, downtown luxury hotel, which owns two Bösendorfer concert grand pianos. Morgan used the DPA 3532-S stereo kit of large diaphragm mics placed as shown to record Italian pianist, Roberta Pili, winner of the first prize at the Bösendorfer Piano Competition in Vienna.