Whenever the recording engineer uses stereo microphone techniques, he/she has to consider a recording angle resulting from the positioning of microphones relative to sound sources, besides other acoustic factors. The recording angle, the width of a captured acoustic scene and the properties of a particular microphone technique are closely related. We propose a decision supporting method, based on the mapping of the actual position of a sound source to its position in the reproduced acoustic scene. This research resulted in a set of localisation curves characterising four most popular stereo microphone techniques. The curves were obtained by two methods: calculation, based on appropriate engineering formulae, and experiment consisting in the recording of sources and estimation of the perceived position in listening tests. The analysis of curves brings several conclusions important in the recording practice.

The aim of this paper is to describe the process of choosing the best surround microphone technique for recording of choir with an instrumental ensemble. First, examples of multichannel microphone techniques including those used in the recording are described. Then, the assumptions and details of music recording in Radio Gdansk Studio are provided as well as the process of mixing of the multichannel recording. The extensive subjective tests were performed employing a group of sound engineers and students in order to find the most preferable recording techniques. Because the final recording is based on the mix of "direct/ambient" and "direct-sound all-around" approaches, a subjective quality evaluation was conducted and on this basis the best rated multichannel techniques were chosen. The results show that listeners might consider different factors when choosing the best rated multichannel techniques in separate tasks, as different systems were chosen in the two tests.