Still trying to get confirmation that I understand what MirPro is doing to the dry signal?
Let me try to summarize and if you can just confirm accuracy mainly regarding the dry signal...
- The original dry signal that came into MIR is never passed through in any fashion. MIR blocks it and replaces it with the "MIR-positioned dry" signal.
- The wet signal has had the direct instrument sound to the main mics specfically cut out. But otherwise it has all reflections happening in the room, early and late..as encoded in the IR's, but with the direct sound from the instruments missing.
- MIRPro modifies the incoming signal, which is assumed to be a center panned signal; and effects the signal to provide spatial information, the result is the MIR-positioned dry signal
- The wet/dry slider can be used to adjust the balance between the MIR-positioned dry signal and the wet signal, described above.
- The MIR-positioned dry signal has been time aligned with the wet signal to avoid any phasing problems that are typical in real world recording situations.
- The dry signal is regarded like a close spot mike, but after a mixing engineer has applied a few more typical adjustments to that close mic dry signal, resulting in a stereo MIR-positioned dry signal. The following options are available for the dry signal:
- The directivity filter option will determine whether the direction of the player icon will have any bearing on the dry sound. If checked, then it will be considered like the mic is planted to the floor, and directivity profile will be used to effect various aspects of the sound such as level, EQ, etc..based on directivity profile. If unchecked, then the direction the player is facing has no bearing on the dry sound, only to the wet sound.
- Distance depedent scaling, if checked, will take into consideration the distance from the player to the main mic and adjust the LEVEL accordingly in the dry signal.
- Air Absorption, if checked, will roll off HF from the dry signal, based on distance from the player to the main mic.
- Proximity effect is not adjusted automatically by icon placement on the stage, however there is a character profile called "Distance" that can be used to specifically remove proximity warmth in order to place an instrument futher towards the back of the stage, somewhat generically, in terms of proximity warmth.
- LR pan of the instrument is determined by the icon location on the stage relative to the main mic. The dry (and wet) output of MIRPro will be stereo, panned signal
- The width of the instrument or ensemble will also be determined from the icon and will effect the dry signal in the stereo panned output in some way.
- Instrument and character profiles provide a few typical default EQ curves (and 2100 other settings), in order to get a slightly different engineered sound out of the instrument. The ones built for MIRx mode are of interest because they have been crafted to make VSL instruments sound great in specific VSL rooms. These will effect both the dry and wet signals.
If that is all correct as stated, then that about covers it I think. My overall impression is that the wet signal will generally just take care of itself, it has all the widths, sizes, distances, panning, directivity, reflections and everything else that actually happened in the room...all present in the IR's... so the wet signal will have all that, but will sound kind of wet because the direct sound to the main mic from all the instruments has been cut out. You can play around with different mic arrays to hear more or less of the later reflections or to change the stereo width of the wet sound. Or adjust the dry/wet slider or reverberation time to taste.
Then we mix the above mentioned MIR-positioned dry signal in with the wet using the wet/dry slider...which has had some of the spatial information engineered back into it, such as panning and directivity, but might not be a complete picture of the actual distance to the main mic in terms of proximity EQ. We lost that when we removed the direct signal from the main mic. Its ok, it just means a pre or post EQ may be useful to dial that in exactly if the character profiles aren't enough of a fix.
