Stream Loud, Stream Strong
That’s it for testing cardioid mode quality, but there are 3 other modes you can try. With the help of Chinchilla’s Nightmare and a Yamaha FG180 Red Label guitar, the other modes were given a chance to show off what they were capable of. In the same small room seen in the podcast, Chris recorded about three feet from the mic. Not exactly a studio, but a proper studio His mic costs less than $100, so this is more likely a usage scenario for his Sentry streaming his mic. They wouldn’t use Audacity for recording either.
In stereo mode, the left and right channels definitely meet in the middle, and there is some crossover, but some separation is maintained. This is exactly what it advertises and is almost always what you want for recordings, placed in front of the sound source as listeners generally expect.
The omni-directional mode gives you a solid sense of the ambiance of the room and does a good job of capturing sound bouncing off walls. If you have multiple instruments or want to give the listener the feeling of being in an open space. It also just sounds good overall.
Two-way mode was tested by twisting the mic so that the active pickup was oriented vertically. It captures much more isolated sound than stereo mode. That’s not necessarily the effect you’re aiming for, but if it is, there’s a definite difference between bi-directional and stereo modes. It also obviously helps in interview situations as the same separation exists during the discussion.
