We put the five microphones up, positioned ourselves in a circle around them, placed the “subwoofer mic” near a bass-heavy instrument, and pressed “Record.” There was minimal alteration of what the microphones heard. We did overdubs and cuts. When mixing, we removed some unwanted sounds–like the engine of the Russian trawler docked across the street from the recording room (“Go out to sea and catch some fish or something... please!”). By and large we tried to record the quiet passages between storms and propeller plane take-offs at the nearby tiny local airport.

Other than such instances, I cannot think of a single time when we as much as touched the treble or bass controls to 'improve' the sound of any instrument or voice. There was no need. The mix was already done when we chose which instruments to record and how to place the microphones.

The five-microphone array gives all sound sources a physical 3D placement. (There are two overdubs of electric bass that were not recorded in this fashion, as well as some overdubs done with just 2 or 3 microphones.) If you hear a voice up close, the vocalist simply walked up to one of the microphones of the array, which remained in the same place between overdubs, apart from when traveling to other recording locations.

There are lots of overdubs in true surround. Naturally, this resulted in some hefty track counts. Before submixing, I at times had 70 surround tracks, the equivalent of 400 mono tracks, chugging along at 96KHz/24bit.

In the mix, some artificial reverb and subtle limiting were applied. The mixes for the 2.0 versions are done from the source material, not simply down-converted from the original 5.1 tracks.

Recording equipment: DPA 4006/4011/4021 microphones – Millennia HV-3D preamp – Apogee Rosetta 800 converter

SA-CD layer: DSD 2.0 and 5.1, 96KHz/24bit. Blu-ray disc: 2.0 LPCM and 5.1 DTS-HD, 96KHz/24bit

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