Friends, Cohorts, References...an unordered list

• Ambisonic Surround Sound and other information from Martin Leese with links to other surround-sound sites
• Audio Engineering Society in New York, with links to other AES sites.
• Bob Katz' informative CD mastering web site. Information to help musicians, producers and engineers produce better CD Masters. (Altamonte Springs, Florida)
• Helsinki University of Technology, Acoustics Laboratory with an excellent links page to nearly every other audio site out there...
• Prof. Dan Russell's acoustics homepage at Kettering University, including excellent animations of diaphragm resonant modes and solid intuitive explanations of many acoustic fundamentals
• Quintessential Sound, last NYC home of the late lamented Gabe Wiener and Pro Gloria Musicae records
• Ribbon Microphone information on sales and service of ribbon velocity microphones
• Sound and Media Lab at MIT
• Website for Ron Streicher and Alton Everest's definitive book New Stereo Soundbook, Second Edition. Highly recommended as a reference and working text for all sorts of stereo sound pickup.
• Geoff Martin's new site of audio information containing, among other things a textbook-in-process Introduction to Sound Recording .
• Great River Electronics Dan Kennedy's microphone preamps, state of the art transformer based designs. We use them.
• Millennia Media John LaGrou's microphone preamps, state of the art transformerless designs. We use them.
• Jürg Jecklin's course materials on hearing and microphones from the University for Music and Performing Arts, Vienna

There's usually a good discussion of pro(fessional) and pro(duction) audio topics on the newsgroup rec.audio.pro. The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from this group was written by Gabe Wiener, who died on April 9, 1997 at the age of 26. His FAQ is an excellent starting point for inquiry. Gabe started (and we maintain) the ProAudio mailing list which has a interesting discussion (and a lot of history in the archives). There's also a "DAT-heads" mailing list that carries a lot of information on live taping of music, tape copying trees and the like. DAT-heads regular Jeff Maggard assembled a Microphone FAQ in 1993 that still has more useful info than many expensive texts on this topic. You can get it here on recordist.com in text format or in hypertext with links

Be sure to check out Meridian's Acoustic Renaissance for Audio, a worthy diatribe that might just get some of the needed hooks in place on one of the new formats so that, for once, maybe, there might be enough bandwidth for good sound in some commercial media.

Often, we get inquiries about the precise orientation of ORTF, NOS, Jecklin disk, Decca tree, etc. Well-meaning enthusiasts have been known to obsess about the precision in spacing and pointing microphones according to these documented recipes, as if recreating some textbook orientation would guarantee, or even contribute to, success. While there is good reason to precisely duplicate a setup once you are pleased with how it sounds in a given room, it's actually destructive to your understanding to spend a lot of energy on getting it precisely to someone else's recipe. These methods are starting points which must be adjusted to fit the equipment, the room acoustics, the performance and your own taste. Sometimes the "magic" methods are changed in mid-stream, for instance the Jecklin disk system of using omni mics and a round baffle, or the various iterations of omnis on a sphere as described by (among others) Güunther Theile at the IRT. Much can be learned by studying other recordists' approaches, particularly if they write well about things to listen for (as Jecklin has). Read and think, don't copy!