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 I have commented before that with all my admiration of the fact the BSO made the 88/24 available I was not completely thrilled with the job SoundMirror did. Those zillion microphones that John Newton’s team stack in each empty space of Symphony Hall was in a way beneficial as it helped to keep the audiences noise down but it also created problem with “interesting” imaging of BSO. There was one ugly nuance that derived from the poly-microphone techniques. The BSO files are properly recorded at -2 db most of the time with very gimmicks but of you look at the last movement of the Mahler 6 then you will see that in few instances the signal enters very hard digital clipping. The most interesting is not the clipping itself but how the orchestral dB power rises. It is almost DC type of rise with characters of sound moving from full orchestral crescendo to simple high dB flooding of sound with a single note.  It never happens in normal music.

What I think happened in there was the SoundMirror’s poly-microphone bitten the BSO by its tail. Most likely  SoundMirror has microphones right among the trumpets or trombones sections and the microphones were calibrated for the section’s normal outputs. However, those horns are highly directional and it looks like some of the player in Mahler ecstasy was pointing the horns toward to the microphones, completely flooding BSO balance. It does not happen in all movements and I do not think that SoundMirror channels the mix between the movements. They might use the movements from other days but in the one that they have chosen they missed that very unpleasant change of orchestral sound at high dynamic level. It would never happen if they records with two microphones and dummy head. I also have absolutely no problem with standard 3 hanging BSO microphones from which FM is broadsided.

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