The Rubens Quartet -- Mendelssohn, Quartet in A minor, Op. 13 (Third Movement)

The Rubens Quartet (http://www.rubenskwartet.nl/index.php?lang=eng) played their first US house concert in a large and attractive NYC Upper West Side apartment on February 26, 2009. The program included WA Mozart's "Quartet in B-flat" (K. 589), and F Mendelssohn's "Quartet in A minor". This is the third movement of the Mendelssohn piece. The room had high ceilings and an open floor plan; it easily accommodated the 50+ audience members. You'll hear some audience noise. The Quartet sat on older wooden chairs that unfortunately squeaked and creaked -- you'll hear that too. For a small performance space, the room wasn't bad. The apartment's air conditioning system created a steady, quietly audible, rushing air sound in the background. Occasionally, if you listen closely, you'll hear some of NYC's traffic sounds too. This concert was recorded with a Core Sound TetraMic feeding an Edirol R-44 four-channel flash memory recorder. The Rubens Quartet sat in a semi-circle facing the audience. The TetraMic was centered in front of the semi-circle, roughly four feet in front of it. The R-44 had its four sensitivity controls set to -36 dB and the level controls set halfway up (roughly at 0 dB). Once the levels were set, a Behringer CT100 tone generator's output was recorded to the four channels. These allowed me to match gain between channels in post-production to better than a tenth of a dB. If the R-44's level controls are set to full-on (which is +8 dB, if I recall correctly), its noise and harmonic distortion performance degrade noticeably. When set to 0 dB or less however, it seems to be pretty good.

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 Creative Commons, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works

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