Nashville, TN (September 22, 2011)—Classical recording engineer and producer Jamey Lamar recently used his Metric Halo ULN-8 to record the Naxos release, Alfred Schnittke: Complete Violin Sonatas.
Lamar was an early adopter of Metric Halo FireWire interfaces. “The Metric Halo ULN-8 is the centerpiece of my kit,” he said. “If I need more than eight channels, I bring my Millennia Media HV-3C, my Metric Halo ULN-2 and my Lavry Blue converters, and feed the AES outputs into the ULN-8.”
The Schnittke project featured Carolyn Huebl on violin and Mark Wait on piano. Both musicians hold faculty positions at Vanderbilt University, and Lamar made the recordings in the university’s Ingram Hall. For the main mic pair, which ended up contributing about 75 percent of the sound at mixdown, Lamar used Sanken CO 100Ks, spaced just over four feet apart. A pair of Schoeps MK-2s set far and wide from the main pair added room tone. The Schoeps MK-4 and MK-21 covered the piano, and the Schoeps MK-8 with a second MK-21 covered the violin. The violin spot mics, configured as an M/S pair, were unusually close to the instrument in order to affect separation from the piano and to highlight the delicate nature of much of Schnittke’s violin writing.
All eight microphone signals went into the Metric Halo ULN-8, and Lamar used MIO Console’s M/S plug-in to decode the violin spot mics. “The sound of the Metric Halo mic pres is fantastic,” said Lamar. “I would be gratified to find preamps of that quality in a standalone unit at a much higher price. Similarly, the transparency of the ULN-8’s converters goes toe-to-toe with standalone units at a much higher price. But to have the pres and the converters together in a small Pelican case that can easily fly to sessions and festivals around the country is beyond amazing.”
Metric Halo
www.mhlabs.com
