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.
It was designed to show off stereo sound which was still fairly new at the time. I like the way those recordings sound actually.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’d be perfectly fine if everything was just mixed mono. I see little value in stereo. I’m weird like that.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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
The Beatles springs to mind for me.
Elea👂👂nor Rigby.
Beatles albums prior to… I want to say The White Album? Or it might have been Sgt. Pepper/Magical Mystery Tour, were recorded in mono and originally released in mono. “Stereo” versions were released (“Fake stereo” AKA recording in mono and panning it to one side or another) which are the ones that sound kinda bad imo. They were never intended to be listened in stereo other than as a novelty.
It wasn’t until their later albums were they actually meant to be listened to in stereo. Eleanor Rigby, being on Revolver, was not recorded with “real” stereo mixing in mind as far as I understand it. If you’re listening to the 2009 Stereo Remasters (the Box Set versions), then they were properly mixed into stereo, and sound pretty good. However, the original experience was always meant to be mono.
Though I’m sure there’s some expert on this shit that knows more than me.
I have all of the remasters, but it’s the newer mixes that really do a great job with stereo. I love the Beatles. :) The Giles Martin mixes really are awesome. I hope he gets to all of them.
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.
CMV: Mono mix of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” is better.
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
