[Frank Stearns]

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

Frank Stearns wrote:
(Scott Dorsey) writes:

We've had parts of this discussion before, and it's still a bit odd, imo.

Here's why. For me, headphones do /not/ present a "hole in the middle". In fact, the
left-to-right imaging is excellent -- far better than an average room and maybe even
just ever so slightly better than my mix room.

It _is_ excellent... it's exaggeratedly excellent. That's what's wrong with
it.

See, this is a little weird to me, because I've not experienced it. My old room had
such good imaging that it was just like headphones. With intensity potting in, say,
Protools, you have around 200 "set points" from far left to far right -- and you
could darn near hear every one of them with the old room or with cans.

And, the pan positions were *evenly* spaced. I never got the sense from either the
room or the cans that the position moved quickly out to hard L or R in a non-linear
fashion.

But I hasten to add that in a good performance space, seeing a totally acoustic
event, such as a chamber orchestra and choir, I've had a similar sense of highly
refined and exact imaging of every instrument and nearly every voice. (This is from
a distance back that would be approximately the same as the width of the ensemble,
perhaps a touch more.)

I've experienced this many times; it's one of the delights in seeing something live
that hasn't been polluted by amplification -- you can typically locate everything on
stage that produces sound, even with your eyes closed (by far my preferred way to
listen live in any case).


Take a mono signal in headphones and it is right dead center, just like
Phil Allison says. But as soon as you turn the panpot just a little bit,
it very quickly moves to the side, so the stereo image is very exaggerated.

This is what has not happened for me. The movement is very linear -- very even -- as
I pan something out left or right. Now, I have had that "zoom pan" happen on
speakers in some rooms, but never in the phones. That's why I like to use cans to
verify how I think I've panned things.

If a listener has a good room, they might then enjoy my lovely left-right fill of
the pan spectrum (I do sweat this aspect when I mix, and often wonder why so many
mixes seem to be a simple L-C-R and not much more).

If they're not in a great room, things still should work passably well if the
underlying mix is reasonably good. The panorama presented is just a nice little bit
of icing on the sonic cake (just like those live events that can be so much fun).


I guess this is not really a hole in the middle but two holes on either side
of the middle, if you want to get technical. But people call it "the hole in
the middle" so we're kind of stuck with that.

Okay. I'll certainly take your word for it; I've just not experienced it.

If you add slight delays to get phase imaging instead of amplitude imaging,
the effect is even more pronounced. Stuff moves very quickly to the side
as the delay increases, much more quickly than on speakers.

I did quite a bit of this in the blues ablum I just mixed -- I spread the lead
guitar somewhat across the panorama using delay; it added something of a live flavor
to the mixes. Might not be exactly what you mean, but the delay was an effective
"add" to the mix. Coupled with the reverb fields, this also increased the
front-to-back to something that felt fairly live.


And, so too some front-to-back imaging is apparent in the phones, depending on the
quality of the recording.

Yes, but the front-to-back imaging is different than on speakers. If you
mix on speakers and then try to mix to sound similar on headphones, you wind
up adding a lot of reverb to the headphone mix to compensate for the room
that isn't there. (Or maybe you remove reverb from the speaker mix to
compensate for the room that is there, if you'd rather think about it that
way.)

Here too I've not had the sense that I should change the reverb fields for cans vs.
speakers. For me, if the mix seems appropriate and balanced on one, generally it
works for the other.

I don't mix on headphones because things start feeling claustrophobic and there are
some spectral issues. But, because of their highly accurate imaging, I always use
phones to check panning.

Doing field recording work, I sometimes have to work only with headphones and
it takes some practice to judge ambient/direct ratios with headphones, because
if it sounds good in the phones, it'll be way too distant on speakers.

Fortunately, I've not had to live-mix something critical with cans in the field. The
huge problem there is when you're in (or near) the performance space. Any acoustic
leakage from the actual stage sound mucking with what the cans are putting into your
head can be quite misleading.

I guess we'll have to leave it at YMMV.

Sure. But I think we can agree that if you want a mix to sound good on
speakers or headphones, or whatever, you should mix it to sound good on
whatever you want it to sound good on.

Well, see my comment above -- in my cases generally one should work acceptably on
the other.

This is an interesting discussion, though. Perhaps I've been lucky based on the type
of material I record and mix?

Frank
Mobile Audio
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