The Art and Science of Surround and Stereo Recording

Spatial Hearing.- Correlation und Coherence.- Stereo microphone techniques.- Surround microphone techniques.- Artificial head recordings.- Some thoughts on subjective listening tests.- An attempt at a qualitative ranking of several surround-microphones -- an examination of various studies in the field.- Analysis of frequency dependent correlation and coherence in surround microphone systems.- Analysis of frequency dependent correlation in stereo-microphone systems.- BQIrep -- proposal of a 'Binaural Quality Index' for reproduced music.- Case studies of surround and stereo-recordings. - Short history of microphone techniques including DECCA, RCA and COLUMBIA.

Edwin Pfanzagl-Cardone is head-of-sound at the acoustics department of the "Salzburg Festival" of classical music in Austria. After completing his degree in Electronics Engineering and Information Technology at TGM, he graduated from the "University of Music and Performing Arts" in Vienna in 1991, and received a Tonmeister (Sound Master) degree. In 2000, he completed his M.A. in Audio Production at the University of Westminster, London. In 2011, he received his PhD in Musical Acoustics and Psychoacoustics from KUG - University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria. Since the early 1990s, he has been working as a sound engineer for music recording and live sound reinforcement, and for film and TV, mainly in Europe, but also in Japan and the United States. As an arranger and composer, he has released recordings with BMG and SONY in the field of pop music, and has provided content for international library-music labels, and for radio and TV commercials.Author of AES and VDT-convention preprints, Dr. Pfanzagl-Cardone has published more than 60 articles in magazines for sound engineers, such as Pro Sound News Europe, Studio Sound, Media Biz, and Prospect. Since March 2010, he has been teaching Sound Reinforcement Technology at the Faculty of Design, Media and Arts at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg. As a composer he has released four international CDs. In addition to several hundred archival recordings for the Salzburg Festival, his discography as a sound engineer consists of about thirty CDs and three LPs with music labels such as Deutsche Grammophon and Orfeo. He is the inventor of three microphone techniques: the AB-Polycardioid Centerfill (AB-PC), the ORTF-Triple (ORTF-T) and the Blumlein-Pfanzagl-Triple (BPT), and holds a patent in surround microphone technology.