So there I was one evening in 1974 setting up to record a rehearsal of a piece to be recorded next week for the producer, who was out of town. Hauled the Crown SX-722 and the Sony TC-854 in and set them up. Hauled in the tall, heavy Atlas mic stands, hauled in the mic bag and the cables. As I was getting ready to set up mics, I realized that since the Ampex MX-10 mixer wasn’t available that night (Rick had it on another gig) and both recorders had unbalanced mic inputs, I couldn’t use phantom power. Uh Oh! I had been thinking I’d use the Crown’s built-in mixing facilities.

The only mics I had that didn’t require external power were a pair of Shure 315 ribbons and a couple of $20 Radio Shack electrets, so that’s what got hoisted. It was merely a rehearsal, so nobody but the producer would hear it. What better time to try out some of the minimalist mic techniques I’d read about?

The ribbons got mounted on a stereo bar as a crossed fig.8 pair seven inches apart and hoisted 12 feet up just behind the conductor’s podium. They fed the Sony. That tape was the better of the two, warm, great image, and decent hall sound. It went to New York.

The Radio Shack electrets were hoisted about 12 feet apart at the footlights as high as the stands would go, maybe 15 feet. About even with the first violins audience left and celli on the right.  Omni pattern, probably had little Panasonic capsules inside, powered by a penlight battery. They fed the Crown. Thank heaven I had some shielded 30 foot TRS cables in the bag.

So I had two classic mic setups I had never tried before to compare and contrast with the usual pair of KM84s or C414s hung farther back in the auditorium. Disaster? Hardly. Both recordings were presentable sonically. Here’s a raw excerpt from the cheap electrets.

Another result of this adventure was the addition of balanced XLR transformer inputs with 48V phantom power to the Crown. No need for the MX-10 or the AKG phantom power supply afterward for simple 2 or 4 mic jobs.