History of Panning/Stereo Imagining

Any info on what time period "left-center-right switches" were on consoles and when panning pots took over and became the norm?

At the beginning of "Axis: Bold as Love" (1967), do you think that's a panning switch or a pot? It sounds like a switch to me. (BTW: "Spanish Castle Magic" really has stereo nailed back in '67: drums, bass and vocals center, double-tracked guitars hard left and right.)

Then in '68 at the beginning of "Back in the USSR", the panning of the airplane sound pretty smooth, but then on "Revolution 9" all the panning sounds like switches...?

There also sounds like some pretty smooth panning on Led Zeppelin I (1969).

I also realize that, before panning pots, a stereo mic setup could have been implemented and a sound source could have been moved around to create a smooth panning effect, though I don't know if anyone would have done this.

 

Well don't forget you can pan with just LCR switches so it's not so cut and dry. It's pretty simple to do, but I'll let you guys figure out how to do it.

 

Thanks for the input Doug.

To clarify, I'm mainly interested in finding out approximately when panning pots became standard on consoles.

 

Well the first studio console I worked on had a few, but they had to be patched in. It was heavily modded, but essentially a mid to late 60's Electrodyne console.

My point is that it's hard to tell simply by listening to recordings, as it was relatively easy to pan on consoles that didn't have channel pan pots.

 

Did you mean "Imaging" ?

 

Well, stereo "imagining" kinda nails it for the first two Beatles records

 

I think perhaps he's referring to moving an image around in the sound field. The easy way to do it with a console without pan pots is to mult ( that's studio talk for a Y ) an input to two adjacent channels, switch one to the left and the other to the right. Now you can easily position or move that signal by changing the relative levels of those two faders. If they are both equal the signal is in the middle.

 

HA...yes...embarrassing

 

AHA! So there's really no way to determine from listening when panning pots were implemented.

 

Late 50s
EMI and BBC desks had panable sources
Beeb desks even had stereo width control (MS processing)

 

This thread just made me think of the Supremes "Where Did Our Love Go" with its handclaps and the intro of "You Keep Me Hanging On" with distortion on the opening sounds.

 

Btw, the Helios console we had a Dawnbreaker, which I installed in 1977, had pan pots of course, but we also had some quad pan pots with joysticks. Like with the Electrodyne console I mentioned upstream, they had to be patched in. I can't remember them ever being used on records as we did nothing in quad at that time, but they could be useful if you sent their rear outputs to a phase manipulating device which would create a surround effect of sorts out from the 2 main speakers. I played around with phase manipulation in those days, and even designed some phase manipulating devices, but never came up with anything that was all that satisfying.

 

It seems clear to me that you can't get the fullness and size of a well-mixed modern stereo record with only three positions.

 

Sure you can.

It all has to do with microphone placement. You can make some of the best sounding recordings, which can be very full sounding, with just two mics, one placed hard left and the other hard right. Remember that with 2 mics, the mic on the left will still pick up stuff from the right and visa versa. As long as your mics are not isolated, there will be much common ground, which means lots of stuff spread across the entire stereo spectrum.

Of course this philosophy can be expanded if you are using more than 2 mics. It just requires planning before recording to get the results you want.

 

Of course...d'oh! I'm thinking of the more "immediate" sound of modern stereo records where there's many tracks of close-miked or direct-line instruments spread over the entire stereo field. With only stereo room mics, I wouldn't say you would get both fullness and the type of immediacy characteristic of modern records.

 

Niiice...thanks!

 

Well yes, I guess that's basically true, but it can still be done with a little creativity. Once again you can double up on faders and essentally assign any position you want to any track. I guess just about anything can be done in the studio if you're creative enough and know how to get what you want out of the tools you have to work with.

Keep in mind that this modern style of recording basically came into vogue after large format multi track tape recorders came into being, and by that time most consoles had pan pots. In the older days you had to essentially get the mixes, or sub mixes right live on the spot. With the advent of the 2" multi tracks, things changed and not always in a good way. The new philosophy seemed to be to record everything isolated and dry, and to recreate what was lost by that process in the mix.

After a few years a lot of engineers started to rethink things and evolve away from those super isolated recordings. Many of the early 70s multi track recordings suffer from this IMO.

 

??????????? You Keep Me Hanging On is in mono.

 

FWIW, I'm into the super-full and immediate sound of modern "super-tracked" mixes...very powerful. But I also love the minimalism of old full-track and two-track stuff as well.

 

You haven't heard the stereo mix?

 

Ther IS no stereo mix. It's in mono on every release ever. Not even reprocessed stereo. Just straight mono.