I suggested to an engineer I know that he purchase the modified M-S matrix that Greg makes and he told me he never uses a matrix, he usually runs the side mic to 2 channels and flips the phase on one of the channels.
Does this make sense to anyone?

Chris

yeah, it's exactly the same as swapping the wires in the cable. swapping the mic cable + and - wires is inverting the signal polarity... which is the same as flipping the phase once tracked.

then why use a matrix box?

it totally depends on your setup or need when tracking...

if once the M and S are tracked and you have the cability to also invert the SIDE, then you won't need the Matrix Box.

I do this all the time. It just takes up three tracks of tape (if you mult the side on the way in) or three channels of the console if you mult on the way back. With the matrix, the encoding is done inside the box, so you only need a stereo pair of signals either way. If you set up the matrix on the way in (I assume--Greg or somebody please correct me) you're committing to your stereo width, but you could also just print the mid and side mics to two tracks and bring them back through the matrix to a stereo pair of channels, using the matrix to adjust width.

Hope this helps.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

everyone, wish greg a happy birthday today (sunday).

every time i've done MS, it's been encoded to tape (needing decoding in mixdown). (addressing the why do you need an MS decoder question). when decoding in mixdown you need 3 channels as described above. this begins to be a pain in the ass. if you have a MS decoder box like greg made, you can just print your stereo pair to the tape machine and bring it up as a pair hard panned LR as you would normally with a conicident pair or whatever. it's just more convenient to have a dedicated decoder (or encoder, fuck i'm getting bad on terminology here) so you don't have to have say your mid mic on ch 9, then half of your side on 10 and the other flipped half over on 26 or some shit to decode it. if chan 9/10 on your tape machine are your stereo overheads or something, you probably dont want to shift track 11 to input 12 on your console so you can keep your overheads all togehter.... so it's a workflow thing.

yeah.

muffin kicked ass in bowling tonight.

M/S is no pain in the ass with Samplitude. Just record your M and S to separate tracks, Flip the phase on the left side of the S track, even though it's a mono track, you're done... now mix to taste.

the deal is, if during mix down, you can't easily create a hard panned S and inverted S from the single S track, then it's best to print two S tracks during tracking, S and Inverted S and have them side-by-side... next to the M.