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Does make it easier to isolate vocals I guess
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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The jump from mono to stereo made a lot of engineers' heads spin. Then again, how many 100% perfect 5.1 albums have you heard?
Actually, I've listened to only three 5.1 remixes, all of them phenomenal albums to begin with, and their 5.1 jobs were pretty meh. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots came out pretty good, but mainly because they just fucked around and tried stuff.
I hate the “spatial” mixes.
Sometimes they’re done really well, but most of the time it’s just putting different parts of the song in different areas and makes it sound “diluted”.
Like, the guitar is in front of you, then the bass is behind and to the left… why??
You’re missing a key ingredient: Lysergic acid diethylamide.
In all other circumstances I agree with you.
Lysergic acid diethylamide doesn’t fix a bad mix.
You can still hear all the separate instruments surrounding you on a good regular mix, all the spatial does is break the interwoven sound.
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My understanding is that most (at least rock) music is mixed this way, just subtle enough to help your brain pick out instruments but not enough to consciously notice.
Music is mixed that way, but spatial then takes a hammer to that concept.
It takes away the single interwoven sound and imo sounds like different tracks being played on opposite sides of the room.
I usually try the atmos mix for an album if it’s available on tidal, and usually all it ever does is remove the punch from songs.
Have you ever listened to Zaireeka appropriately? I haven’t, but that must be a headache to line up correctly.
It was a pain in the ass but me and a buddy got it working once. I was a young teen and this was long before weed helped me see more beauty in music, so I didn't get much out of it, but as an adult it'd probably be different.
I thought part of the point of Zaireeka is that it is impossible to get it exact every time, so every time you play it it is a unique soundscape.
There's some cool 5.1 and even 7.1 stuff in classical music (I don't have a a surround sound setup myself but I hear a lot of talk of it).
It makes sense. I bet it's super hard, especially at first.
It's largely a headphone problem, at least for me. I can't listen to a song where certain tracks are completely isolated to one ear. The audio doesn't need to be mixed perfectly, but I need at least a little bit of each sound in each ear. Otherwise it's too distracting. My brain hates it.
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It’s fun and interesting all the experimentation that went on back then. As someone deaf in one ear… it’s hard to truly appreciate, but I get it.
They \just got stereo bakk then igth
I'd be perfectly fine if everything was just mixed mono. I see little value in stereo. I'm weird like that.
In electronic music you often slightly detune the left and right of a synthesizer to make it sound "wide", you can't do that in mono and if you mix the stereo down to mono it sounds boring.
However most clubs are going to be playing mono so always bounce to mono and test mix.
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like @zaphod said, its mostly to make it sound wider. in mono, everything sounds like its in the center of your skull. in stereo, some stuff it a few inches from my ear (wherever the drivers are), some stuff can be in my head, some can even be in my throat if that makes sense
Things like Spotify or your phone/earbuds themselves usually have a mono setting. I use it all the time when only wearing one earbud. Beatles songs are notorious for splitting vocals to one ear only.
The solution is already right there. But let me guess, "No, I want to use my old wired earbuds from 1995 and they should accommodate me in my archaic niche use case instead of me upgrading my earbuds to enjoy the new features developed like forced mono"?
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Think this is more an artifact of the way vinyl records worked - since audio can be encoded in two channels via the way the needle moves in certain orientations
Urr, I don't think that's it. I'm not sure stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary, and it wouldn't really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?
A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls
karaoke moment
This would be more early 60’s, mostly because those engineers were working with 2 track stereo which really limits your options. Most artists were recording on at least 8 track stereo by the 70’s.
Exactly. This is a 60s thing, not a 70s thing.
Hendrix springs to mind
I noticed that I had blown the front left speaker in my first car when bohemian rhapsody was missing vocals. I don't remember when "a night at the opera" came out, but I'm going to be bold and say the 70s.
You know, I love those albums where they fucked around did things like hard-pan all the drums to the right channel. I'm here for the experimentation.
Turns out early audio consoles with stereo didn’t have a pan knob. They had a pan switch. So choices were limited to left, right, or center (mono).
Wasn’t til later that the pan pot was invented allowing incremental panning and true stereo mixing.
That's wild. But theoretically they could make two separate mono tracks, right? For example, a left mono track with 75% of what would have been an isolated left channel + 25% of the right channel and, similarly, a right mono track with 25% of what would have been an isolated left + 75% of the right. Then, sure, pan switch it fully to left and right.
That's even more complicated.
Exactly. Plus the common use of mastering at the time was to optimize the recorded audio for printing on a vinyl disc, and if the grooves were too deep or the transitions to Sharp it could cause the needle to skip out of the track.
If your average listener is going to be listening on a mono device then a smart thing to do would be to pan one thing consistently to one side and the other to the other as the mono needle isn't going to care where it's getting its vibrations from. That would give you more resolution and more depth for the cut, as long as the final disc was only played in mono.
I'm not saying that's the case for every recording but I'm pretty sure it has happened quite a few times back then while they were still figuring everything out.
You have to understand that mixing consoles from that era were supremely limited in channels (think four, eight, later sixteen), to the point where they would often have to mix one section (say, the drums) and then record that mix to tape so it would take up a single channel and then do the guitar, bass, and vocals on another channel. The idea of having two of the same thing going through two channels was an exorbitant luxury they couldn't afford!
Thank you, that's the piece of info I never had. If it's not a Reddit-level fact. The 2 channels were new and people wete trying things out and mind-altering substances were freely available as well, so judgment might have been hogtied at times.
At the time, there was sentiment that it was a way to sell two amplifiers and speakers instead of one, a suspicion furthered by the later arrival of quad, which for many was a bridge too far. Audio places tried that briefly and then went back to selling stereo. And may be why a certain generation looks askance at 5.1 etc.
There were other changes as well, tubes/valves to solid state plus hybrids...when I read about Cloud products in IT, it rhymes, marketing hoodoo inveigling into genuine tech appraisals.
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I mean this is true but not about the '70s as the original post states. Even by the '60s they had sophisticated stereo audio mixers - they just cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of running on people's phones like today.
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What's interesting is just how different the quality was of some of the stereo releases vs the mono bounces. For an example, the stereo HDCD version of Pet Sounds is a little wack, but even if you joined the two channels to mono it sounds a hundred times better than the shittastic mono release. Got to wonder if they optimized it for AM radio play the way that similarly awful sounding releases in the early 2000s optimized for iPod earbuds.
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has anyone tried out apple's 'spatial audio' and how it compares to 5.1?
It does what it claims to do in that it makes the music sound like it’s coming from a set of speakers a few feet in front of you in a room that has poor sound deadening. I really tried to like it but it just sounds more muddled/is fatiguing for me.
Edit: I haven’t tried it on acid yet tho, maybe that would make it make sense.
There's actually a biological reason for this, believe it or not. Language and music "time share" many characteristics of both hemispheres of the brain. Language and music are processed in different hemispheres.
Read pages 20-26 of the book "How Music Really Works" by Wayne Chase. It breaks it down in detail.
One of the worst abuses of stereo in my opinion are old Beatles albums. Maybe cuz the tech was somewhat new they were playing far too much? Too much for me anyway
The early days of stereo (which is what you’re talking about, the recordings of 70s which aren’t using stereo as an “effect” almost universally have the vocals panned to the center. The old way to take the vocals out of a recording was to adjust how much of the signal present equally on both channels was allowed to be played) were all about two things: backwards compatibility with mono systems and giving people with stereo systems a recognizable effect no matter what goofy system they had.
Wild panning accomplishes both goals.
Studio engineering that used the stereo format to create the illusion of a room or capture the sound of the room the players were playing in wasn’t developed yet and came from the experimental stereo recordings that sound crazy now like silver apples of the moon.
Just put it in mono. Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
Instrumental-only music?
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It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it's like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.
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It was designed to show off stereo sound which was still fairly new at the time. I like the way those recordings sound actually.
Wild guess but stereo equipment wasn't a thing in households and it was a way to get the adoption going
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