Hot answers tagged stereo
11
The difference is due to something known as "panning laws". Imagine you have recorded a mono track, and it is currently panned centrally. You decide you want it panned all the way to the left. Did you want it to also drop to half volume at the same time? Probably not. Yet that is what would happen if the DAW simply turned off the signal going to the right ...
11
Short answer is that it's just a good rule a thumb.
Basically you run into phasing issues when the same sound reaches two different mics at different times at similar levels. The 3:1 rule is to ensure that the sound level in the more distant mic is enough lower than the sound level in the near mic that that effects of the phase difference will not be ...
7
I would move the tracks to something like Audacity and do the L/R channel editing there. Audacity lets you split a stereo track and make a copy of L to R and so on..
Ofcourse if you want to stick to Garageband, there is a long winded way.
Pan it hard left.
Export as mono.
Re-import as mono..
I can't think of any quick and easy method.
7
The lissajous shape is generated by graphing the left signal on one axis against the right signal on the other axis. So consider a few scenarios for a sine wave tone.
Mono signal: L is always equal to R, so the point (L, R) is always on the x=y line, so the plot is a straight line. Vectorscopes usually rotate the axes 45 degrees, so x=y goes straight up ...
7
With headphones you get complete separation, which you don't get with speakers. Therefore the stereo imaging is different. And it can be better, if the music is made to listen in headphones, but worse if it is not.
An extreme example is Sargent Pepper. Listen to it on speakers, and then in headphones. There is no stereo field in any real sense, instead some ...
6
Thermal Noise
It's highly likely that what you are experiencing is a natural phenomeon that is entirely due to the internal electronic circuits within your amplifier. I'm not saying that external EMI doesn't come along now and then and cause noise because it does, however, what you have descibed is "thermal noise" - a constant hiss.
Where does it occur? It ...
5
The simplest way to see these for yourself is to look at the metal connections on your jacks. You'll find a stereo one has one more metal ring than a mono one.
The mono jack has a tip and a ring, and where that ring is overlaps two of the stereo jack's rings, so plugging a stereo jack into a mono plug effectively shorts your right channel to ground at the ...
5
Well, I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the statement is even correct.
How often do you see a piano where the player face the audience? In most cases people encounter real pianos (ie at home) the piano faces the wall and the player has his/her back to the audience. In concert situations the pianist usually sits with his side to the audience, so there ...
5
You can do a basic implementation manually in any daw:
Copy the track
Pan both tracks left and right respectively and symmetrically
The dry channel should be around 18dB louder than the Haas channel
Add a time delay of 13ms-~50ms to 'Haas' channel'
Be careful how much Haas you use, it affects the tonality of the track when summed to mono.
If you have ...
5
With headphones you will get complete separation of left and right channels. You will only hear the left channel in the left ear and the right channel in the right ear, assuming you don't listen at insane volumes or put the headphones on backwards :)
With speakers, aside from the reverb and echos in the room mentioned by @Eugene, you will still hear at ...
4
I am not sure why this question was asked, but if you intend to do a production that is meant to be listened to specifically with headphones, there is an option on which I would like to write a general note.
Binaural system
You can record your stuff with a binaural microphone system (you don't have to get your hands on an artificial head, I got astonishing ...
4
When ever I've done stereo micing before I've used 2 identical mics. However there is a technique which uses 2 different mics called Middle Side, which then needs to be decoded either through hardware or software to give normal Left-Right signals. It's something I've often thought interesting but never had the opportunity to play with.
4
You can use the amerge and pan filters in ffmpeg to combine two mono streams into one stereo output:
ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex "[0:3] [0:4] amerge,pan=stereo:c0=c0:c1=c1" -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le output
or using -ac instead of pan:
ffmpeg -i input -filter_complex "[0:3] [0:4] amerge" -c:v copy -c:a pcm_s16le -ac 2 output
[0:3] and [0:4] refer to ...
4
For the most part, with centered mixes, there is very little difference between speakers and headphones other than the impact of the acoustics of the room versus the sterile headphone environment.
When you get in to stereo panning, however, an interesting thing happens. In a room, both ears hear sound from both speakers, so a sound coming only from the ...
4
Super simple explanation of the invert button. Imagine a simple sine wave. Thats the solid line in this graph. If you had the invert phase button on a console or use the plugin in your DAW does the same thing, you get the sine wave illustrated with the dotted line in the graph.
Why do you care? If you were to sum these two sine waves you'd end up with ...
3
I had the same problem. Based on some suggestions in other forums, I tried five easy things. One or more of the changes I made did fix the problem. Here are the things I tried:
Deleted all of the album art from the song files. Do this in a separate folder with copies of the songs, not in your primary music folder on your computer! Otherwise you will ...
3
You can without any concerns plug a stereo cable into an unbalanced mono jack; as long as you only send mono signals (i.e. L and R channels equal) it will work just fine, except for the usually -3 dB pan law and possible short-cicuiting of the ring connector; the latter is however unlikely and not harmful for line connections. (It can be harmful for e.g. ...
3
The easiest thing to do would be to turn your two stereo recordings into two mono recordings. You might be able to do this by summing your left and right channel, but it is safer to pick either the left channel or the right channel and use that. This is because you might have phase cancellation when summing the two channels to mono.
Now that you have gotten ...
3
Yes, trust you ears but refer to these tools as much as possible.
If in doubt, try doing some testing yourself: take to a car, headphones, poor quality "media desktop speakers" mashed up in the corner of the desk and see how they translate.
And more important of all: mono compatibility! BBC still won't allow stuff that is not mono compatible to be played ...
3
I generally say trust your ears unless you're introducing some kind of specific technical hurdle.
So unless you know that you're going to run into technical issues, say, pressing vinyl, why not allow the out-of-phase components? Especially if you think it sounds better with them? And even if that is the case, maybe vinyl isn't the best format for ...
3
Usually you work mics which record the "direct" tone and mics which record the room sound. So place your SM58 in the middle near the piano as you had. And place to mics 2-3m away from the piano. Then mix all three together. You'll get clear piano sound with nice room reverb and a stereo effect.
3
Mark is completely correct. I'll add a little to it. Acoustical summing at dead center in a near field should add 3dB to the sound energy over hard Right or Left, when patched directly (not using a pan pot).
The general purpose of the 'panning law' is to compensate for this acoustical summing when panning through center. When done right, as you pan your ...
3
There's no perfect solution to this one. As you mentioned omnis are out of the question so go with cardioids or figure-8s with the nulls pointed at the brass and percussion. You could also put up some reflectors behind the orchestra to help reduce the bleed.
Where to place the mics is just a matter of finding the best compromise - far enough from the ...
2
I would say both. When recording, say, blues, rock, hard rock, or really any type of rhythmic music then I would still lay out the instruments in a stereo configuration that mimic stage positions; lead vocal, drums and bass in the middle, instruments that occupy similar frequency ranges go in opposite sites. From there I'd play around to see if some other ...
2
Not always true, in classical music recordings (and in my opinion, all live recordings), using stereo effects is generally not done.
You are mentioning 'panning' instruments to get an intensity-based stereo image, while there is an alternative: time-based stereo. That is the stereo kind you get by using for instance an AB microphone system.
Try this:
...
2
How well does this type of interface work between a (low end) PC sound card and a "prosumer" mixer (Yamaha LS9-32)?
In my experience, coupling things together via S/PDIF is hit and miss. If both the sender and receiver can't find a sampling frequency and bit depth that they agree on, it isn't going to work. For example: I could run S/PDIF out from my ...
2
I'm having a tough time understanding what that reviewer is talking about. "Most headsets use stereo mics."?!? A microphone is, in it's nature, mono.
The way your adapter is wired, yes, it is just a regular TRRS jack. Left, Right, Mic, Ground (not necessarily in that order :). I couldn't find any wiring diagrams for this adapter, but I don't think ...
2
In my case (Jetta 2007), MP3s encoded in VBR (one of the albums I bought from Amazon MP3) will randomly fail with "Err Title". Very irritating. You can check whether an MP3 is encoded in VBR by right clicking on the track in iTunes and then choose Get Info. The info screen will have Bit Rate field, and VBR will be shown in parentheses if the MP3 is encoded ...
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