I was playing around tonight, and thought I'd put some actual audio into this discussion. I played a short noodle and recorded with 6 mics, a pair of LDs, a stereo ribbon (that I'm counting as "2") and a pair of SDs. LDs are 14 inches apart, spaced, Ribbon is centered in MS mode, SDs were 4 feet apart for a wide spaced pair. Here are mixes in order:
LD spaced pair (2 mics)
LD+MS Ribbon (4 mics)
LD+MS Ribbon+SD wide space pair (6 mics)
MS Ribbon+SD wide spaced pair (4 mics)
There are of course, nearly infinite variations on placement, relative mix options, etc, and this is just one example. One thing I'm usually thinking about when doing this kind of thing is mixing the different mic characters, not just the placement. For example, ribbons are smooth, but a little dark, so combining them with a condenser, I hope to get the best of each. With different placement, you get some different elements of room sound and mixing different stereo images.
An interesting aspect of this is that as I'm playing around with mixes, bringing in a 2nd mic raises the overall level (until I adjust levels), so it seems like adding the 2nd pair makes a big difference. For the demo here, I level matched all samples, and a lot of that disappears, so the differences are far more subtle to my ear than they seemed as I was mixing.
I prefer 2 of these over the other 2, but I'll be interested in what others hear.
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