Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Stereophonic!

Sometimes, stereo sound really bugs me.

It has nothing to do with the fact that I love my single-speaker record player, I swear. (Well, at least mostly it doesn't...) But sometimes, when the stereo isn't mixed but is a huge spread, it's very disorienting.

When I have one instrument coming out of only one ear, I get very unnerved. (This is of course something that only happens with headphones...) And then when the other instruments come in and take the other ear, it doesn't help, it only makes me more uncomfortable.

I am not going to be a music purist or elitist, but when the music I'm listening to is something that can be done live, I want it to at least try to emulate the live experience. (This sentences is constructed as such to allow for the fact that some recorded music is never meant to be performed -- or even performable -- live. And that's perfectly okay, and even awesome sometimes.)

I don't need an audience, I'm okay with things being spliced (though I am happier not knowing about specific splices), and I'm more than okay with levels being messed with, but c'mon, can someone explain to me when in the tangible world sound doesn't bleed? That's what makes it so disorienting to listen to these hyper-stereophonic recordings: if you're listening to something that is directly to your right, your left ear doesn't hear silence, it still hears what your right does, just not as clear and a little later!

When my brain only hears something in one ear, my thoughts usually start with an expletive followed by a "my headphones died!" or even worse, "I think I'm deaf in my left ear!" I don't like it, and I plan to never allow an engineer or producer mix an album I work on in this way. Sure these albums sound find with speakers, and actually pretty awesome because it is more like the "real live" situation, in that an instrument's sound only comes from one localized place, but we live in an earbud culture, and things need to sound just as good in headphones. You can't swing a dead cat 'round here without seeing 10 people with headphones in, and that's the direction the recording industry has gone -- and will continue to go, likely.

Minus the dead cat.

This rant has been brought to you by bad my linux equivalent of iTunes on random and producers and recordings artists.

2 comments:

  1. This bugs me too- not nearly as much as it bugs you, but I've definitely wondered if music companies should release two different mixes: for home stereos, and for headphones. I got really confused once, when the right side of my headphones died. This was when I was in middle school, and they were cheap to begin with, but still. In many of my CD's, I lost about half of the instruments.

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  2. I can't believe I actually read some of your blog. Anyway, I'm in full agreement. I find that jazz albums are frequently the worst stereo mix offenders. I shudder to think about using headphones with anything released by Fresh Sound New Talent. Sorry guys, but I don't think it's "neat" or "hip, daddy-o" to have the piano/rhodes and guitar panned ultra hard to the left and right respectively. Should one of those musicians make the decision to lay out at any point, it creates a major vacuum in the sound field and totally disorients the ear. Awesome. That's exactly what I want in the middle of a track.

    As production values go, I think that pop/rock albums are held to a much higher standard, so these sorts of mix issues are far less common. If there are disorienting mix choices, it's almost always intentional to achieve some sort of effect. Not to say that there aren't also veryverybad pop/rock mixes, but I think, as bad pop/rock mixes go, stereo imaging is usually not the flaw.

    Anyway, I have to go & slave at the PRO salt mines, but I somehow accidentally read your blog and then posted a comment about it. Don't tell anybody.

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