So what are you proposing, Mike? A return to the “ping-pong” stereo recording of some of the early (late Fifties) stereo demonstration records? Or perhaps a train running through your living room in a radio drama?
Seriously, though you’re right about our being “c[ap]able of hearing direction, and even depth (distance),” but we seldom hear those things in recordings of any form of popular music. The typical pop recording, where everything is separately miked and pan-potted into its place on a synthetic stereo “stage”, doesn’t give the listener the correct phase clues. The apparent placement depends on the relative level of that particular voice or instrument on the two channels.
Worse yet, the labels that own some of the first rock’n’roll hits that were mastered on four- or eight-track machines – and then mixed down into mono, because they were conceived as mono – have taken it upon themselves to arbitrarily assign the tracks to either (or both) of two channels to create “stereo” mixes the original producers never conceived.
Of course, this isn’t real stereo; I like to call it “multiple mono.”
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, that technique was also applied to some otherwise appealing classical recordings, with CBS/Columbia (now Sony) being the worst offender. In the worst cases, the producers practically put every soloist in the orchestra in your lap! Those records actually sounded better when played monaurally. Then, it was no worse than an interesting movie with too many close-ups.
Fortunately, the advent of digital recording brought a return to simpler, purist miking in classical recordings. (But this was not, as analog haters would have it, because digital was more “revealing” of the weaknesses of multiple mono. Rather, the needlessly complex, often muddy sound of those bad mixes – which was very apparent on an LP played on a good system – taxed the capabilities of the earliest, usually ditherless, digital recorders far more heavily than the simpler, and far more realistic, signals from purist miking.)
But as for radio drama – or comedy – I’ll concede that stereo can be effective. After all, I have heard the Firesign Theater albums.
Seriously, though you’re right about our being “c[ap]able of hearing direction, and even depth (distance),” but we seldom hear those things in recordings of any form of popular music. The typical pop recording, where everything is separately miked and pan-potted into its place on a synthetic stereo “stage”, doesn’t give the listener the correct phase clues. The apparent placement depends on the relative level of that particular voice or instrument on the two channels.
Worse yet, the labels that own some of the first rock’n’roll hits that were mastered on four- or eight-track machines – and then mixed down into mono, because they were conceived as mono – have taken it upon themselves to arbitrarily assign the tracks to either (or both) of two channels to create “stereo” mixes the original producers never conceived.
Of course, this isn’t real stereo; I like to call it “multiple mono.”
Back in the Sixties and Seventies, that technique was also applied to some otherwise appealing classical recordings, with CBS/Columbia (now Sony) being the worst offender. In the worst cases, the producers practically put every soloist in the orchestra in your lap! Those records actually sounded better when played monaurally. Then, it was no worse than an interesting movie with too many close-ups.
Fortunately, the advent of digital recording brought a return to simpler, purist miking in classical recordings. (But this was not, as analog haters would have it, because digital was more “revealing” of the weaknesses of multiple mono. Rather, the needlessly complex, often muddy sound of those bad mixes – which was very apparent on an LP played on a good system – taxed the capabilities of the earliest, usually ditherless, digital recorders far more heavily than the simpler, and far more realistic, signals from purist miking.)
But as for radio drama – or comedy – I’ll concede that stereo can be effective. After all, I have heard the Firesign Theater albums.
