i was looking through some old tracks to see what i could polish and build upon for the upcoming ambient online compilation album. lots of my old tunes have plenty of things that can almost objectively be described as bad mixing, but what i've observed most frequently with them is the loss of a lot of information in full mono; great shifting drones are reduced to acoustically sparse husks of their former selves, reverb is emasculated, sometimes crucial atmospherics vanish almost entirely... i looked at a number of my older songs and, with the help of an instance of voxengo span on the master channel, found that it's always the case that my music that loses lots of information in mono has mid information equal to or a few decibels below the side information. i analyzed some music from cryo chamber and, logically, found that what sounded very good in mono tended to have much more going on in the mid range than the side range (oftentimes, on tracks like cities last broadcast's "fourth floor", the mono information was 10 db higher than the stereo information!).
for sound design that doesn't need to incorporate the stereo field, that's all well and good. listening through headphones, there's tracks where it sounds fine for the most prominent things in the mix to lack stereo depth. however, that's not viable for all tunes; if i wanna mess around with the listener's spatial perception of sound, if i want to make things sound like they're three feet in front of the listener, or from a distant abyss, or behind their head, i basically need to accept that a lot of that will be lost in mono sound systems. this leaves me a choice between minimizing the importance of three-dimensional mixing in my workflow to accommodate my listeners who aren't fortunate enough to have two speakers, or disregarding those people in favor of providing the best listening experience possible to people listening in stereo. this is my dilemma: how much should i degrade the quality of my work to those listening in stereo to provide for the people in mono? i know this can vary on a per-track basis but is there anything my mixes should trend toward doing? i think most people expect mono sound systems to be poor quality and i know that ambient music is typically regarded as something that should be listened to through headphones, but the large majority of ambient tracks i hear go for the conservative approach of making nearly everything audible in mono. i know that when it comes to mixing it's generally best to follow what others are doing, but how necessary is that in this case? more generally: should i make my work as good as it can be for the majority of my audience but disregard a minority of listeners, or appease the minority at the expense of making it slightly inferior for the majority?
also, does anyone have any techniques for manipulation of the listener's spatial perception of audio that work in full mono? i'm aware of mid/side processing and know to watch out for effects like chorus, reverb, and delay that can quickly add too much stereo to a sound... but are there any less obvious ways to make things sound fuller in mono?
for sound design that doesn't need to incorporate the stereo field, that's all well and good. listening through headphones, there's tracks where it sounds fine for the most prominent things in the mix to lack stereo depth. however, that's not viable for all tunes; if i wanna mess around with the listener's spatial perception of sound, if i want to make things sound like they're three feet in front of the listener, or from a distant abyss, or behind their head, i basically need to accept that a lot of that will be lost in mono sound systems. this leaves me a choice between minimizing the importance of three-dimensional mixing in my workflow to accommodate my listeners who aren't fortunate enough to have two speakers, or disregarding those people in favor of providing the best listening experience possible to people listening in stereo. this is my dilemma: how much should i degrade the quality of my work to those listening in stereo to provide for the people in mono? i know this can vary on a per-track basis but is there anything my mixes should trend toward doing? i think most people expect mono sound systems to be poor quality and i know that ambient music is typically regarded as something that should be listened to through headphones, but the large majority of ambient tracks i hear go for the conservative approach of making nearly everything audible in mono. i know that when it comes to mixing it's generally best to follow what others are doing, but how necessary is that in this case? more generally: should i make my work as good as it can be for the majority of my audience but disregard a minority of listeners, or appease the minority at the expense of making it slightly inferior for the majority?
also, does anyone have any techniques for manipulation of the listener's spatial perception of audio that work in full mono? i'm aware of mid/side processing and know to watch out for effects like chorus, reverb, and delay that can quickly add too much stereo to a sound... but are there any less obvious ways to make things sound fuller in mono?
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