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Default Mind Stretchers

On Sun, 27 May 2012 11:29:38 -0700, Gary Eickmeier wrote
(in article ):

OK, I have been sufficiently worked over for now. I thank you all - or
both - for some great discussion. You have read what I said, and that is all
I can ask.

NOW, assuming I am all washed up, that my statements that there is no stereo
theory even at this late date in audio history is wrong, I sit at your feet
as a student.

How does stereo work?

Gary Eickmeier




Gary, There are a number of treatises on how stereo works, and I'm sure you
can find them if you Google it. Simply put, stereo works because of a
combination of level differences between left and right microphones, phase
differences and time delay differences. Taken together they provide two
different perspectives on a musical ensemble, taken together, these
perspectives form a right and a left channel during playback.

Here's an anecdote. Back in 1947, Film composer Alfred Newman was scoring the
movie "Captain from Castile". When it came time to record the score on the
soundstage, Newman decided he wanted to place separate microphones on both
the left and the right side of the orchestra and record them to two separate
tracks on a 35mm optical film recorder. His reason for doing this is because
for some cues, he wanted the strings to dominate, so he'd use the track for
the left microphone for that. Other cues needed bass viols and brass to
dominate, and there he would choose the right microphone track, and for many
cues he'd mix both tracks together. After the film was completed the music
tracks went into the 20th Century Fox vaults where they languished for many
decades. In the 1990s, a CD company called Screen Archives Entertainment got
permission to mine the Fox vaults for filmscores to release on CD. They came
across the original 35mm music score film for "Captain from Castile". They
were initially a bit puzzled because most film scores were either cut to
transcription disc, or recorded on 16mm optical film recorders. Threading-up
the film revealed that there were TWO optical tracks on this film, instead of
the customary one. Playing them back, some technician noticed that 1) the
tracks were of the same performance and in perfect sync, and 2) one seemed to
emphasize the left side of the orchestra and the other emphasized the right
side. Intrigued, the engineers played the two tracks simultaneously through a
pair of stereo speakers, and low and behold, the score was in stereo! Now,
from the notes that Newman made when scoring this film, we know that this
possibility never even crossed Newman's mind when he set this up. He was
going for a different effect altogether!

When SAE released it's two CD set of the music from "Captain from Castile",
they released it in stereo. They digitized it and ran it through digital EQ
to make it sound more modern and they digitally removed the hiss. The result
is that 24 cuts out of 25 are very acceptable stereo (the 25th, the "main
title" was recorded monaurally because Newman wanted the entire orchestra for
that cut). You might be able to find a copy of this release, if you're
interested. The catalogue number is SAE-CRS-0007.

So you see, stereo can even be successfully recorded accidentally!
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