They are certainly Neumann SD mics, at least the lower pair seem to be omnis (KM183). Both John Willett and Tony Faulkner are advocates of the 'point them upwards to avoid HF excess', particularly with outriggers for Decca Trees.
From a 2016 Tony Faulkner conversation with Greg Simmons of Audio Technology (AT) magazine:
TF: Yes. Actually, we’ve got two ‘thinking man’s reverb’ mics hanging from the ceiling for this recording. They are also prototypes from Røde — omnis. They look remarkably like NT5s with omni capsules, but these are revised capsules and electronics and they’ve got a flat black finish, which is nice for television.
AT: They are end-address microphones and yet you have them pointed upwards, vertically. That shouldn’t make any difference with an omni, in theory, but in practice most omnis become a bit duller off axis.
TF: Yeah. Bizarre, isn’t it? Most people think I’m an idiot when I do that sort of thing but it’s particularly useful if you’re in a dead hall. Quite a lot of modern concert halls have got a short reverb time, maybe 0.7s or 0.8s, and that makes it quite hard to make a big string sound. When the producer or somebody says they want to hear more strings, they don’t really want to hear individual players shrieking on the E string, they just want a ‘bigger’ sound. That often means more reverb. For example, I did a cycle of Vaughan Williams symphonies with the BBC Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davis; they wanted a lusher string sound in the slow movements so I twisted the M50 outriggers back to front.
AT: So they were pointing at the back of the hall instead of at the strings?
TF: Yes. You still get the same ‘weight’ coming from the strings but it’s more blended and smoother, and it’s more effective than turning on some kind of reverb box. There’s less detail from individual players, but if it’s a slow movement of a Vaughan Williams symphony that’s the sort of sound you want. It wouldn’t work for a finale because when the brass gets going it’s going to sound like an echo return!
AT: What did you think of the prototype microphones in that ‘thinking man’s reverb’ configuration?
TF: I’m very impressed with them, and I can use more of them than I had expected to. Sometimes, if you use some particular single diaphragm omni pencil mics for this purpose, you can’t add enough because it starts sounding phasey, but these prototypes from Røde seem very coherent with each other as a pair. They will give us a lot of control over the reverberation time, which is what we want when we’re recording a concert and we don’t know how big the audience will be or how much they will affect the venue’s reverb time.
AT: On the topic of sounding ‘phasey’, how far apart are they?
TF: For me, outriggers would be typically 1.8m either side of the conductor and in line with the main rig. In an ideal world, one would like to be able to adjust the spacing until it sounded appropriately de-correlated, but in the real world they end up rather loosely set up as defined by holes in the ceiling or anchor-points on the lighting rig for dropping cables. In the case of this recording we used the existing cable cradles that the concert hall had hanging from above, so it was a bit empirical. Jason Blackwell [Sydney Opera House recording engineer] sorted it out very helpfully because he knew what was possible using the existing cabling.
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So that gives some rationale behind the pointing up or down (or backwards) methodology......
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