Mono v stereo

[Mahlerei]

I have Gustav Mahler playing some of his own music on the piano and the remastering is really good. Hardly a crackle can be heard. there's some of his vocal music to, which is very good quality as well.

But as far as I know he never recorded his own music (unless you're referring to the Welte-Mignon piano rolls, which are modern recordings, not remastered ones).

[Ventilhorn]

Coincidentally, I took delivery last week of two newly issued CD's on the Eloquence label of Karl Bohm and the VPO recorded in the mid-1950's. The mono sound is glorious, rich, clear and detailed and full credit to Victor Olof and Cyril Windebank for obtaining such splendid results in the Musikverein. You completely forget that you are listening in mono and the clarity is far better than many a more modern effort in the same venue in stereo. Much the same can be said for an Archipel issue which I recently praised of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde in a 1960 radio relay from New York. The wonderful truthfulness of the mono sound here and in the Bohm reissues is a joy.

Great mono or poor stereo? I know which I prefer.

[Ventilhorn]

Thanks for that, Petrushka. I think this thread is developing very nicely and you have summed up my original thoughts very well.

VH

[Jasmine Bassett]

While I would agree with the posters who have said that a good mono recording can be better than a bad stereo recording given a good performance I think there is a basic misunderstanding about the use of two loudspeakers and the term stereo.

If a listener has two loudspeakers and from the central listening position hears a distinct left channel and a distinct right channel there is something wrong with the set up. Two channel stereo (solid) sound should give a smooth spread of sounds between and potentially outside the loudspeakers.

To add a further complication there has been much work done on the differences between hearing mono through one loudspeaker and hearing a virtual central image through two loudspeakers. This has seemed to suggest that timbre of the music is more correct through a single speaker.

As to hearing mono sound sitting in a concert hall - I'm not sure I understand the concept and even less do I understand the science.

[Ferretfancy]

During the early stereo era record companies were releasing discs in both mono and stereo pressings,but mono soon disappeared. However the BBC had strict guidelines to ensure that listeners in mono got a properly balanced signal. Unfortunately this involved reducing the width of the stereo image, and I suspect that it's not much observed today.
I have many fine mono recordings from the past, and it's extraordinary how good they can sound, but they were very variable in quality. Of course, there have always been superb recordings which stood out from the rest, but quality is more consistent now. There is also the fact that many poor or indifferent mono recordings have vanished from the mainstream.
The flood of historic reissues over the last few years has been a revelation to me. I did hear some of them back on 78s in my teens, but there have been some great discoveries. I've particularly enjoyed solo piano music by the likes of Petri, Cortot, Edwin Fischer and others, and how good those earlier engineers were.

As far as stereo is concerned, surely operatic and choral music has been the main beneficiary, where a good dynamic range can be realised without loss of clarity to create a more involving experience, and the stereo era has produced some masterpieces. Nobody should ignore Beechams La Boheme or the pre-war Die Walkure Act I with Melchior and Lehmann, but I don't honestly think that they compare technically with later stereo performances. We should just be grateful for having them.

[Chris Newman]

I am happy with mono recordings if they are clear and the performances are good. For example, many of the Tommy Beecham recordings from as early as pre-WW2 are as good if not better, to my ears, than some stereo recordings from the sixties and seventies. The balance is more realistic than many of the "hi-fi", "Surround-sound" and other gimmicks of that era. Beecham was not alone: Mackerras, Horenstein, Basil Cameron, Boult and Previn all seemed more demanding on the sound quality. As an aside, sadly BBC Radio 3 seems to be returning to hi-tec and distorted sound with broadcast concerts.

Then, of course there are historical recordings that are cleaned up by engineers like Michael J Dutton, Mark Obert-Thorn and Andrew Post who are in our debt for such treats. The clarity of some Historical Naxos, Beaulah, Somm and Dutton recordings yield miraculous mono performances. Talking of cleaning up recordings, as some of the favourite EMI recordings of our youth (stereo as well as mono) slip through the 50 year old mark and come into the public domain it is interesting to see that some EMI classic recordings sell as Great Recordings of the Century at around £8.00 per disc now come out at around £6.00 on much clearer and realistic sounding CDs from other companies who put in a bit of extra sound engineering work.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Oh, don't get me going on the subject of Naxos transfers of historical EMI recordings. I was modded for this on the old BBC boards, and I have to be whiter than white here.

[Panjandrum]

I have a couple of mono recordings on CD and they are acceptable, but not to my ears in the same league as stereo recordings. Interestingly, I have been reading a number of reviews on the Gramophone archive, and have been struck how the reviewers, to a man, all endorsed a preference for stereo, right from the early days. This suggests to me that nostalgia may have a part to play for those expressing a predilection for mono.

As a non sequitur, I have noted that BAL reviewers will often choose an early mono recording as their basic library choice, or historical recording, citing an extra element of electricity about the performance which overcomes audio shortcomings. My view is that the attendant snap, crackle and pop tends to lend an artificial element of "electricity" to the recordings. The ear leading the mind to equate these strange attenuated sounds with a greater degree of inspiration than the actual performance warrants.

However, I would be most interested to learn what techniques are being employed by certain record companies to "clean up" the sound from these old mono masters. Are we still getting the real genuine performance, or are they being artificially enhanced?

[Ian]

There are a number a software applications designed to remove unwanted noise(s) from recordings. I don’t how it actually works, but one process involves sampling a bit of the sound to be removed (e.g. surface noise on a disc before the music starts) after which the software tries to remove that particular sound whilst leaving everything else. It works amazingly well if the sound to be removed is relatively quiet which, of course, is not the case in surface noise on old records. In these cases although it is possible to remove all the noise a lot of wanted stuff is going to go as well - the software allows you to flip between what has been taken out and what is left. It just comes down to a subjective decision as to what amount of reduction (if any) gives the ‘best‘ result.

Complaints about editing have always puzzled me. I can understand that an audible edit is not a good thing, but the vast majority of edits are inaudible (particularly these days) How, therefore do you know if you are hearing edits? Is it a case that if the horns aren’t splitting notes the assumption is that edits are to blame. It’s never occurred to me that recording producers might go to the trouble of editing in order to make the recording sound worse.

[Ferretfancy]

Reviewers often seem rather hazy about what can be achieved by editing and what cannot. There's a priceless example in the current edition of Classical Recordings Quarterly, in which Antony Hodgson reviews a 1958 mono Proms recording of Barbirolli conducting Tchaikovsk's 4th.

"The music starts with a chord featuring untidy horns. I cannot understand why such matters could not have been tidied up. A moment's inaccuracy in the concert hall is of no consequence, but why repeat it on a CD when its correction could be so simple ? "

Mr Hodgson does not explain where the editor could be expected to find tidy horn notes as a replacement after a lapse of 53 years!

[Uncle Monty]

If a listener has two loudspeakers and from the central listening position hears a distinct left channel and a distinct right channel there is something wrong with the set up. Two channel stereo (solid) sound should give a smooth spread of sounds between and potentially outside the loudspeakers.

That can't be right, can it?! I would be extremely narked if I couldn't hear separate channels, or at least details within those channels. I don't want smooth, I want distinct.

What's the point of stereo separation at all otherwise? May as well just have a big mono mush in the middle

[Ferretfancy]

Re My message 25, they could of course nick some notes from elsewhere in the symphony, but that would be cheating!
Ferret

[Ian]

That can't be right, can it?! I would be extremely narked if I couldn't hear separate channels, or at least details within those channels. I don't want smooth, I want distinct.

What's the point of stereo separation at all otherwise? May as well just have a big mono mush in the middle

The idea is that a soundstage is created between the two speakers. Sounds can be panned from far right to far left. Sounds might appear to come from the middle, a bit to the right or left, or indeed any place between the speakers.

[BBMmk2]

But as far as I know he never recorded his own music (unless you're referring to the Welte-Mignon piano rolls, which are modern recordings, not remastered ones).

Ah , yes, perhaps your right, Mahlerie. I will have to dig them pout again!

[Ferretfancy]

Uncle Monty
I think Jasmine is referring to is what used to be called "hole in the middle "stereo, with left and right exaggerated and little or nothing coming from the centre. This extreme separation was common on some early recordings, but is usually caused by the speakers being placed too wide apart in the room.

Many listeners never hear an accurate soundstage as designed by the engineers, due to inadequate care in positioning the equipment. If I place a single speaker straight in front of me in an acoustically dead room,and listen, say, to a speech recording, the voice should be precisely defined. Most of us don't have dead acoustics in our living rooms, and sound reflections from walls and ceilings will slightly blur the sound. Listening to the same mono voice through two speakers will blur it further. The trick is to adjust the set up to give the best compromise on a mono source, and this should in turn yield satisfactory results in stereo.

Nothing is that simple, as a speaker on one side of the room may sound louder than one on the other side, so you have to use trial and error. What people often overlook is that we hear stereophonically in real life by using our brains to detect tiny differences in time of arrival of sounds at our ears, and recorded stereo is a clever technique which simulates the same effect, but it is an illusion. At high frequencies sound level becomes more important. In the end, what we enjoy is totally subjective.
One of my friends is perfectly happy with one speaker up on a bookcase, and the other on the floor, while I'm only satisfied if I'm in the best seat in the house!