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How do you visualize the stereo field?


Mark L

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For the most part I've always visualized the stereo field from the audience's perspective. For example I expect to hear the hi-hat more towards the right side of the spectrum because that is where it should be with a right handed drummer.

The only exception would be stereo piano where the bass notes have to be on the left and the high notes on the right. I can't stand it when it's the other away around. I guess it's because I grew up playing the piano and that's the way I'm used to hearing it while I'm playing.

A lot of classic rock records are mixed from the audience's perpective. If the guitar player stands to the left then he is in the left speaker. For example Steve Howe of Yes is almost always in the left speaker while Rick Wakeman's usually towards the right. Over the years I have heard many songs on the radio where the left and right channels were reversed. I could never figure out why, and if it's a song that I know really well it really bugs me. At times I've thought about calling the radio station and saying "Hey your wires are backwards!":smileymad: 

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Folder wrote:

For the most part I've always visualized the stereo field from the audience's perspective. For example I expect to hear the hi-hat more towards the right side of the spectrum because that is where it should be with a right handed drummer.

The only exception would be stereo piano where the bass notes have to be on the left and the high notes on the right. I can't stand it when it's the other away around. I guess it's because I grew up playing the piano and that's the way I'm used to hearing it while I'm playing.

A lot of classic rock records are mixed from the audience's perpective. If the guitar player stands to the left then he is in the left speaker. For example Steve Howe of Yes is almost always in the left speaker while Rick Wakeman's usually towards the right. Over the years I have heard many songs on the radio where the left and right channels were reversed. I could never figure out why, and if it's a song that I know really well it really bugs me. At times I've thought about calling the radio station and saying "Hey your wires are backwards!"
:smileymad:
 

Bingo.

Not sure why the disconnect between mixing drums (I typically go for audience perspective as I do for most everything else) and piano, where, oddly, I've always just accepted the player perspective pan. Although I almost always narrow the stereo spread considerably for anything but maybe a piano solo, since, in my day, I never once saw a piano that stretched from one side of the stage to the other. (Now, some of those Harry Partch instruments...) 

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I called a somewhat distant, barely receivable college station twice one summer vacation to tell them they had one channel of their broadcast out of phase, since, in mono (as I pretty much had to have it to get any reception at all), the signal almost completely disappeared, but in stereo, you could hear the program material, faintly, and without hardly any bass, through the static.

The first time I called, whoever I talked to thanked me but seemed more than a little hazy on the concept. It didn't get fixed. Many weeks later I turned the station on, it was still out of phase. I called again, talked to the summer session station manager, who seemed pretty clueless, but made him write down "signal out of phase, one channel reversed" before I got off. A few days before the start of the fall semester, it was fixed.

College radio. = ) 

 

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