My rant about mistakes made in mixing in stereo

Then you haven't heard Nat King Cole recorded on 2 and 3 track. THAT'S stereo.

 

Huge mistakes? I disagree with the premise here. The technology needed time to evolve.

Much worse is what professional engineers did with digital mastering in the 90's, 00's and 10's. Mistakes still being made by professionals every day.

 

I agree with you, those old mixes were not mistakes, but aesthetic decisions which, as a listener, one may like or not. Mistakes are other things: bad masterings, bad cuttings, bad presssings, (wrong notes too! ).

 

There is also the fact that the great majority of common stereo (and mostly ceramic) phono cartridges of the day did *not* have the greatest separation ability, especially in the higher frequencies. In fact, many of them were quite lousy, topping out on a good day at about 15 to 20db of separation, max at 1kHz. (Compare that to more modern models which get up to 35dB of separation at 1kHz.)

Then add to that the counter-intuitive practice of putting speakers very close together in consoles and suitcase type systems (even if the speakers were able to be moved further apart) and you had a recipe for needing as much separation on discs as you could get.

 

Panning drums and bass hard left/right is considered a mistake. And a huge one at that. Nobody in the right mind would do something like nowadays because we've learned not to do it.

 

You fill me with the urge to go home right now to record some rhythm tracks just to pan them hard left/right.

 

I think they did it intentionally.

Not a mistake, simply something that some looking back from years later, do not care for.

How easy to criticize, how much work to try to understand!

 

We did not learn anything.

Recording styles and tastes have simply evolved over several years.

If it were so horribly wrong, wouldn't everyone have thought it back then at the time, and said..."oops"

 

I think this is an accurate description of the reason. I would also add that they felt the need to distinguish the two mixes as stereo was being rolled out to a larger audience. Had they centered the elements that are being discussed, many people would question why they were bothering as it would sound like mono and no one would really understand the distinction.

But this kind of debate has been going on forever and for different reasons. Do any of you remember seeing Pete Townshend knocking Beatle records? The clip is shown in the movie The Kids are Alright. He essentially uses this debate in order to try and get an edge for The Who by complaining about vocals in one channel and instruments in the other on Beatle records. He should have known better, and of course he did. But he used it as a way to draw a distinction by knocking the current kings and trying to sell his group. He surely must have been aware of the mono mixes by the Beatles, right?

Yes, there were some "mistakes" made in the stereo mixes as the world was changing. But the upshot was that groups like Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and other Prog Groups would soon be using the newer technology to make breathtaking records. In retrospect, you could say stereo gave birth to this music.

 

I think he was not complaining about those radical stereo mixes, but just saying that he didn't like The Beatles that much
Speak of the devil, Live At Leeds is a good example of how a bass guitar can sound amazingly well panned to one side.

 

Yes, I agree with both points you make here.

But my point was that it was rather inauthentic of PT to use the shortcomings of those stereo mixes to say The Beatles were junk or sounded like ****.

 

Because it didn't sound THAT wrong at the time ! It sounds very wrong on today's hi-fi equipment but you have to remember (or to learn) that a stereo record player in the 60s was something like this:






Ok? So you couldn't separate the two speakers like today, where you have one in each corner of the room. Therefore channel separation wasn't as wide as today. So having the drums only on one side didn't hurt as much as it does now.

 

Another example of a stereo record player in the 60s

 

The irony in the example you posted above is that the speakers for that phonograph WERE separable from the main unit, but I bet few if any owners did so. I know I didn't when I owned a similar unit back in the day. It never even occurred to me!

 

ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winnah!!!

Joshua277456, go to a yard sale. Pick up one of these exact systems. While you are at it, buy a 60s-era vinyl copy of "Rubber Soul," Capitol version, or the White Album.

Play the record on this little system, with its unseparated speakers and its crappy minimum-separation phono cartridge.

Let us know what you find out.

 

I remember reading an interview where Bear (Owsley Stanley) said (he gave some technical explanation I can't recall now) that listening to stereo recordings with the speakers far away from each other was not recommendable at all.

 

But instead of pondering the reason why, you went and created this thread.

 

No, he was specifically talking about the stereo mix of the new LP Rubber Soul and how it revealed what he regarded as the weaknesses of the playing. Which bad stereo mixes do. The full interview was on a new BBC2 tv show aired January 1st 1966. I think it was called Anything Goes but I can't remember if that's right! Barry Fantoni was the host.

 

This has got me thinking. What were those jackasses who made TV shows in the 1960s thinking, making them mostly in black and white until 1965/6? Didn't they know they look more lifelike in colour? Idiots. What a mistake they made.

 

For some reason I thought those old mixes reflected the instrument placing of a symphony orchestra. With the highs (violins etc) on the left and the lows (cellos etc) on the right of the spectrum. Or vice versa lol!

 

It's ironic that the Beatles stuff had to be hard panned the way it was in the early days. One of the best ways to record acoustic music is with a Blumlein Pair, a system that produces a very natural sounding soundstage, often used in classical recording. It was invented by Alan Blumlein. In 1931. Where did he work? EMI.

 

I guess you are right. All these sound engineers who made hundreds of great recordings up to and during advent of stereo suddenly lost their ability to engineer and mix music! Like another poster said, it's such a shame you weren't there to teach them! Enraging huh?

Now, settle down.

First, there are many great stereo records that had hard panned drums and bass. These aren't mistakes, they were conscious decisions. Drums and keys on the left, bass and guitar on the right, vocals and solo instruments in the middle allow the listener to very easily hear the highlights in the playing of each instruments.

Second, early on, recording consoles had limited input channels and tracks. You couldn't use 6-8 mics on a drum set, record all 8 discretely and then build a stereo drum mix In these circumstance, the producers and engineers decided that the featured instruments (like vocals or solo) would be given the limited available stereo image in the mix. No mistake, conscious decision.

Last, many boards (like those the Beatles used) had channels that did not have variable pan pots. They could be set Left, Right or center, and nothing in between. Technology limit, not mistake

 

Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say.

As for Rubber Soul, our host had relayed a reason why that album was wide stereo, if no one remembers it, I guess maybe no one here listens to what our host has to say

 

In 1960 Bill Porter did great!

 

Inadvertently omitting the drums would be a mistake. Choosing their place in the stereo spectrum is a decision made by an engineer based on his expertise and the input of his colleagues -- i.e., something you might not like 50 years later, but not a mistake.