Mike, this is in reply to your message from May 19, because your suggestions for miking distances to use with supercardioids didn't fit at all with my experiences recording with them in concert halls. I think the problem may be your concept of what is sometimes called "distance factor" or "reach"--there is a basic limit to how far that concept applies in the real world, and perhaps this limit is not clear to you.
As we all know, at any normal distance in any normal room, your microphones will pick up some direct sound and some sound which has been reflected. In general, the farther a microphone is from the sound source, the more its pickup will consist of reverberant sound energy, while the closer it is to the sound source, the more the direct sound will predominate.
Your personal standard for microphone behavior seems to be omnidirectional microphones; OK, say that you like a certain miking distance in a certain hall with your omnis. But someone else (Chikkenguy in this case) is using highly directional microphones. And you're telling him that in order to get the same proportional mixture of direct vs. reverberant energy that you like to get from your omnis, he needs to move his supercardioids about twice as far from the sound source as the distances you like to use. That's based on some solid science, since the distance factor (the inverse of the "directivity index") for a supercardioid is close to 2:1.
Unfortunately, however, your advice didn't make practical sense because at the distances you suggested, his microphones would be in an almost entirely diffuse sound field. At that distance their directionality can do very little to shut out reverberant sound while favoring direct sound--they would function essentially as a pair of rather inefficient omnidirectional microphones. If that's your concept of how directional microphones operate, no wonder you don't like to use them! Distance factors only make sense when you're close enough that the sound field still has a healthy dose of the original, direct sound in it, i.e. at least 50%.
Think about it: As you increase the pickup distance, eventually even a shotgun microphone on its main axis will be picking up sound that is mostly reflected. In a diffuse sound field, you will simply get the diffuse-field response of the microphone at that point in space. And unless you're trying to pick up the rear channels for a surround recording, or some kind of druggy-sounding ambient special effect, that approach will never give you a reasonable sounding stereo recording.
It's basically the same mistake that started this whole thread. Different directional patterns work differently and allow different miking techniques to be used; the same techniques (especially for two-mike stereo pickups) that work with one pattern aren't likely to be effective with another pattern, and there's isn't any cookbook way to translate among them, because there simply are too many real-world factors involved.
--best regards