Anybody else tending to MONO ?

[scottjoplin]

Maybe because you are a musician and used to hearing what would predominantly be a mono sound when playing your violin?

Well? I wondered this a while back

 

[midrange]

This is a very hard question to answer. I played in mainly orchestras, latterly in an Opera House orchestra pit. Whilst my violin certainly is audible almost all of the time in my left ear, the fact is I had to listen in 360 degrees. Apart from playing the right notes, the crucial thing is when to play and how to play. At a given time I would be listening to the singers above me, the rest of my section behind and in front of me, other sections of the orchestra to the side, across the way (we might be in unison with the violas at this point, who are quite distant), the woodwind behind me, etc etc. Of course if everyone is together then all is easy, but if the singer gets ahead, or the horns are slightly behind, then one needs to be aware of all and come to the correct analysis as to where to play exactly. Of course the style of playing needs to be constantly monitored.

What I am hearing bears little relation to what the audience hears (or in a recording studio what is coming through the monitors) because of the proximity and relative loudness of the various instruments. I can be 2 feet from a flute, or very near the horns. Others are near percussion or trumpets or whatever. So I listen in 360 degrees in 3 dimensions. Whilst I can hear everything most of the time, the balance I hear is individual to me.

 

[scottjoplin]

Maybe there is something that is similar to music as it correlates to pictures, since a lot of musicians and producers in the 50's and 60's thought of the mono mix as their final work and thought that stereo was just a sort of gimmick that would be a passing fad the way the quad format became a passing fad.

They were used to mono and knew how to get the most out of it. Some early stereo mixes, I'm thinking mainly of jazz, I find almost unlistenable, with the instruments panned hard left and right, perhaps they didn't know how to use it properly yet, or were using it as a gimmick because they thought it wouldn't last.