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.
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.
Those were the better 3d movies because they at least felt like there was depth. Unlike those modern movies.
My dad had some albums, maybe Mike Oldfield or others…there was a train going through a station, and hearing it pass from left to right in stereo was amazing at the time
I’d be perfectly fine if everything was just mixed mono. I see little value in stereo. I’m weird like that.
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
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.
Cant you do that in mono with two oscillators? Also aren’t analog synths mono most of the time?
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”?
Beatles songs are notorious for splitting vocals to one ear only.
FYI, you’re listening to the wrong mix then. Beatles albums (particularly those before The White Album, or maybe Sgt. Pepper/Magical Mystery Tour, I forget exactly) were never recorded with stereo in mind. The tech was pretty new, and the stereo mixes of those songs/albums were more of a novelty.
If you’re listening to the 2009 Remasters, make sure you’re listening to the mono versions if it’s an album prior to 1967-1968 or so, otherwise you’re gonna get this “fake stereo”, panning a mono signal between L and R, bullshit.
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.
karaoke moment
Today’s music is digitally mixed on laptops and has zero dynamic range or feeling. Then again people listen on Bluetooth now so they are only getting 20% of the music anyways. Makes me very sad
Let’s get you back to bed, Rick Beato.
2024 I finally tried some Bluetooth headphones after maybe 10+ years.
Still using SBC by default, still no duplex HD audio, and still static driver noise at idle.
What is even the point lol. SBC-XQ only solves the first problem which is still inferior to even the cheapest of quality 3.5mm cable.
Even my Nintendo DS sounds better and it’s limited to 32Khz audio lol.
I wonder what you would think of LDAC if you’d ever try that
Tried it and still a big difference between plugged in with a nice dac
Jeez, were one of the two devices 10 years old? That hasn’t been my experience for a long time (except the duplex audio issue. I can’t believe it’s still terrible.)
Then again, I mostly use BT for the convenience. Being able to do yard work with zero wires is amazing.
It was designed to show off stereo sound which was still fairly new at the time. I like the way those recordings sound actually.
Does make it easier to isolate vocals I guess
And instrumentals.
And vampires
They \just got stereo bakk then igth
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.
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.
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.
And yet Pet Sounds (and even the contemporary stuff they originally recorded for SMiLE but never officially released) still sounds phenomenal to this day despite being in mono.
The man was a wizard.
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).
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??
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.
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.
Lysergic acid diethylamide doesn’t fix a bad mix.
I mean… Have you ever listened to “Whole Lotta Love” or “Axis: Bold as Love” while tripping balls? Those panning parts are pretty wild.
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.
It’s supposed to sound like the band is in front of you on a stage. Not all mashed into one spot in the center of the stage. You should be able to close your eyes and picture where each drum is positioned. Where the before guitar players are standing. And you should be able to hear the shape of the room. Modern recordings mixed digitally can no longer do this. Then again if you’re streaming Spotify into Bluetooth your missing most of what’s there anyways.
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.
It’s an incorrect comment based on a real thing.
There was equipment with switched panning, but knob panning was so common it was referenced in diy electronic project books aimed at high schoolers.
There are some tube amplifier circuit types where the pan control actually changes directly what signal goes to what grid of what tube, and in those cases it would be useful to have switch instead of pot pan, but there were circuits to mitigate the problems and even tubes intended to take multiple grid inputs by that time.
Another comment explained how a person could work around that problem and get pot pan with split channels and they’re right.
One of the biggest reasons for switched panning was that it wasn’t always clear that you were going for a stereo effect! Often in the case of reinforcing a live band, you had some speaker cabinets for different frequencies and it would be stupid to send the trumpets to the big cabinet meant for the tympani!
Partial panning was also used in lots of the movie versions of stereo and multi source sound from over a hundred years ago so it’s not like switched panning was the only option or something
Switched panning is famously present on mastering machines though for the old (er than single groove stereo) two groove stereo record type.
So switched panning isn’t the reason for the wild mixing of the 50s and 60s, but it did exist.
Thank you, helpful.
There weren’t crossovers for routing signal in live recordings?
In my youth I wanted to learn more about this stuff, but I appeared to be much younger than I was, so was shooed away.
to be 100% clear, i was talking about using a mixer to run sound to make a live band sound bigger, not to record them, but yeah, to this day lots of live sound cabinets are without crossover.
who needs em when there’s a qualified technician with several amplifiers setting everything up and running the board?
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.
Yeah, we had stereo mixing/mastering pretty much down by the 70s I think…
What I think OP might be referring to are albums that were recorded in mono in the 60s, and then released again in stereo in the 70s when the tech only allowed for full L or R panning. Those albums were never meant to be listened in anything but mono though.
The things people did with mixing in the 70s and 80s were revolutionary, and a lot of the sound you hear today was invented in that time. Things like the drum sound in “In the Air Tonight” with compression gating has been used ever since.
https://www.musicradar.com/news/drums/classic-drum-sounds-in-the-air-tonight-590970
Freakin’ incredible. I’m learning a ton and gaining a huge appreciation of it all thanks to everyone’s comments in this post.
That’s what good link aggregators are for.
I believe that they had stereo mixing pretty figured out by the 70s…
Early-mid 60s though? Sure.
Unless you’re referring to when they started mixing mono albums into stereo, then yeah. Those albums were never meant to be listened in stereo, and I wouldn’t listen to a remaster of any of them unless they were officially approved by the band, or done by the band’s own producer. And even then…
This might explain why old players had a mono/stereo setting.
I think it was to reduce distortion on mono records when played back with a stereo stylus. I could be wrong though.
