SoundField at Abbey Road

If the four-channel proprietary-format signals are recorded, the processing and decoding may even be carried out at a later date, allowing all kinds of detailed alterations to be made to the recorded audio long after the session. As Mark Hornsby commented enthusiastically after his Abbey Road date, "What’s really cool about this is it literally gives you the ability to change the pickup pattern and position of the microphone after the tracks have already been recorded and the players have gone home. Very cool stuff."

Hornsby was first impressed by some drum recordings he made with the SPS200 following discussions with SoundField's Pieter Schillebeeckx at last Autumn's AES show. He agreed to try the SPS200 on his next Abbey Road orchestral session, but sensibly also set up a Decca Tree of Neumann M50s in Studio 1 as a fallback. "I wanted to do a qualified test, where I could A/B recordings from both microphones" he explains, "and the results… well, I'll put it this way — the recordings made with the SPS200 are what I'm using to mix. It's a great, open-sounding microphone, although actually, I think of it more as a recording system than just a microphone. Having the ability to repoint microphones in the mixing environment, after the session, is amazing to me. For example, one of the songs I cut at the session has a breakdown in the middle where the violins take over in a fast solo. In the mix, using the Surround Zone plug-in, I've taken the SPS200 and 'pointed' it at the violins for that section, way after the session. That kind of flexibility is just killer.