It's true stereo because it's true stereo

You might want to read our host's, Steve Hoffman, review of the four releases from early July 2020.
He, like me, considers them "true stereo".
(1) First time stereo: Iconic Country, Pop Standards, Hard To Find Jukebox Classics, 4 new CD releases. | Steve Hoffman Music Forums

I disagree with you and our host.

I don’t need Steve’s opinion to know you are wrong.

If the fiddle is on the left and the accordion is on the right, it’s stereo.

You can believe a dog is a horse because it has 4 legs if you want. But that’s not a convincing argument. At all.

The road to acceptability for Digitally-Extracted Stereo has not been a universally-praised path. Earlier and cruder attempts were quickly criticized (as were the colorization efforts of black-and-white film sources, and not without similar derision). While it's true, the authenticity of something originally created for the medium of its' era, deserves the respect of the original creator's intent...the baby often gets thrown out with the bathwater. Less-successful and unsatisfying results can only improve, once the patience and encouragement is allowed for a process to refine and impress. And that means taking the process seriously, and not just seeing the flawed example in front of you as the only possible outcome. Put your faith in the potential, and not the notion of "sacrilege".

We have all heard the tired cliches of "putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa", but that always comes from traditionalist thinking that simply cannot conceive of that challenge: "what if that mustache...brought out a more realistic impression of that same Mona Lisa, which we had never before considered".

You can stick to your charges of "but it's not authentic"...but then, mono was never a realistic depiction of a soundstage to begin with. Stereo in most cases, is also an "illusion" that fools you into thinking that dozens of sessions and takes, happened all at once in the same studio at the positions you perceive, at the same moment an engineer hit "record". And of course, 5.1, 7.2, and ATMOS can be used to either enhance, or further enhance your original expectations of recordings you are familiar with. Even the basic differences in echo, reverb or other ambient processes can serve to convince you a musician is closer or further from the mic in relation to the person singing the melody, when that may not have been the case at all.

If you ever enjoyed a View-Master experience as a kid, DES mixes should be most comfortably in your range of understanding and acceptance. "Authentic", or less-so.

Amazing how all it takes is for someone to say it’s not true stereo for some folks to get their knickers in a knot. I didn’t make a qualitative judgement at all.

But now I will. I defy someone to make a better (or even equal) stereo mix from a mono using DES than one can make from the actual multitracks. Until that can happen, it may be enjoyable, but it’s just an attempt at mimicking true stereo.

I have a few of the DES discs - and they’re fine for what they are (some attempts are better than others) and they’re light-years better than old mimicking techniques and tools - but I can still instantly tell there’s something missing when I hear a true stereo mix afterward.

Oh, dear god, don't you get it yet...? :doh: Stereo is not real in the first place. You've been lying to yourself all this time, when you think you hear true stereo, when you've been listening to a mix of multitrack sources. Most multitrack mixes are just an attempt at mimicking true stereo. Most of them are not made like you stick a twin mic in front of an orchestra. They mock these up.

A person took each of these tracks from a multitrack tape, and assigned each track to populate an unreal "soundstage", to create (not necessarily "capture") a real stereo image. A person added eq and echo, adding presence, or using ambient effects to make a sound appear further back in the soundstage than originally recorded. You don't even know whether the sounds were recorded together at one time, but you hoodwink yourself into thinking it's all one performance.

Tell ya what. Listen to Sgt Pepper's, both the mono mix, and then the stereo mix. Then, you tell me which one is the "real" performance. :rolleyes: It all comes down to, just how gullible, do you think you are.

I don’t get it? :laugh: I fully understand that, by definition, every recording is not “real”. Thanks for the insight.

Listen to Pepper mono and then the stereo mix? What’s on god’s green earth does listening to two different “true” mixes from multitracks have to do with DES and if it is “true” stereo? I’ve never seen such a lack of reading comprehension and so much desperate wishful rationalizing...

Well, think of it this way...if the mono mix is the "true" one...how can the stereo one be "true"? You even hear things in one you don't hear in the other. Which is the "lie"...neither of them. They're both what the producer intended (mind you, not the producer of the music, but the producer of the recording. )

If you can pull these characteristics out of one source that you don't hear in the other, and neither is "true"...how is a characteristic pulled from a spectral file, any different from a file of discretely-recorded tracks. Just by the process...which is over the years, getting refined for increasingly-better results. So how is that any different than a mix you can derive from separate mics on separate instruments (or for that matter, sessions), and constituting that into a stereo image that never actually existed before the mix, either. :shrug:

I don't think your issue is with "reading comprehension", however relevant that is to the discussion...it's just your being unable to accept the process as legitimate. That, I can understand...we have a few other luddites here you would be very comfortable with. But, like you, I'm probably not going to go to them for a concrete definition of "true", either...

Good grief. You don’t really understand how it works, do you? You’re fixated on the obvious, but irrelevant, notion that no recording is “real” and the false notion there is no distinction between mixing from multitracks and using spectral technology to attempt to essentially recreate those separate tracks for mixing.

You can have true mono and true stereo mixes and true quad mixes and true 5.1 mixes and true Atmos mixes - all from the same multitracks, so again I have no idea what point you’re trying to make about whether the mono mix or the stereo mix is the true mix. I’m defining “true” as mixes created from non-artificially derived, non-simulated separate instrument tracks. I’m not sure what you mean by “true”.

You seem emotionally invested for some reason and are reading things between lines in my words that aren’t there. Show me where I said I don’t accept the process as legitimate. I said no such thing. I simply said it’s not ‘true” stereo and it’s not as good as a true stereo mix.

Again, as I wrote, but you seem to have missed, I have a few of these discs. They are fine for what they are - and some tracks certainly are better than others - but they still don’t sound like true stereo mixes created from real multi-tracks to me (particularly after the initial enthusiasm of finally hearing, say, a 1956 track in stereo wears off). At some point - maybe, probably - they’ll be able to get almost indistinguishable. But they’re not there yet.

So basically, we appear to be agreeing with one another at the top of our lungs. I have an opinion and a perspective, as do you. We can stop shouting now. But, you can feel free to cling to your definition of "true" all you want...you don't own it.

All I did was state my opinion in my initial post. One sentence. I honestly have no idea what your opinion is. It’s all over the place.

I do have some illegitimate copies of Beatles recordings treated with both the OOPS method (out-of-phase stereo) and spectral extraction, with the goal of not presenting an authentic mix, just stretching the possibility of both mono and/or stereo sources beyond their commonly-used tech...just to demonstrate the possibilities inherent in the processes. Some are from as far back as the beginning of the 21st Century, way before the 2009 releases. A reminder, this is not a Beatles thread per se, but the application of the methods will certainly come up in the conversations. ERIC is just one label, and they have access to the titles they can offer because they're located in Canada.

But the technology and the craft of digital extraction is already out of the bag. Hobbyists who hang out at places like QQ and Gearslutz have been applying their talents and technology to it for some time now, and their upmixes are only going to get better and more widespread because of it.

@marcb, who has been here for as long as I have, could have noticed anytime before now that yes, I do indeed have an emotional investment in the progress of stereo extraction, and have had for years. If you can derive stereo imaging from a mono source, how hard would it be to derive surround information from a stereo source by the extrapolation of the same principle? Or for that matter, an ATMOS mix from a quad, or 5.1 resource? And, once you come to that realization, and add that to the improvement of same through constant refinement and better tools, and ask yourself, how far can we take this.

In the '60s, it was "fake stereo" that was the enemy. Now, you take that same concept, and you can use common EQ to separate your audio to derive a non-directional LFE channel (or hell, just hook up a sub to your amp and play an old record; not that revolutionary). Or, try Eno's "ambient" speaker-wiring trick, which he shared on the back of an LP in the '70s: you get a sum of what is not common to both channels, from a third speaker. Or, try the method, which they used to advertise a box for in the back of Rolling Stone at the same time, to remove the middle of a stereo mix, so you can sing on top of it. I produced a ton of parody songs for radio this way decades ago.

Whether it's wave forms or just ones and zeros, the future is no longer in the hands of the doubters, luddites and naysayers. The labels couldn't stop us from ripping our CD's and backing them up on hard drive, and now the sky's the limit for re-imagining what you can do with your available audio . Horse is out of the gate.

The argument that this process is not “true” is without merit. If the left channel has something different happening from the right channel — that is the very definition of stereo.

As for me, I’m very excited about this technology. I think Timos’ idea about Pet Sounds is interesting, although I’d opt for isolating the missing elements that are only in the mono mix and adding them to the existing multitrack.

But, what really interests me is a consumer-level version that folks like me could use to unlock things like mono live mixes or remixing badly-mixed tracks where the multi’s are lost.

I’m fascintated to see where this goes — from Giles Martin getting his wish for better tools with which to tackle the early Beatle albums, to the same tools becoming affordable to plebs like me. It’s very exciting.

Duophonic had something different going on in the left and right channels too. It was stereo, but it wasn’t true stereo.

DES is stereo. It’s derived stereo - pretty decent derived stereo at times. But it is not true stereo, IMO.

I’m personally not excited to have Giles butcher masterpieces. But to each his own.

So, by your own assessment....you could just as easily take a quad mix, and upmix it into a decent 5.1 mix, yes? Just EQ-out the low frequencies, channel them to an LFE; then take the common information from the RF and LF channels, and put that into a center channel.

So, by that assessment...you could just as easily take a stereo mix, and upmix it into a decent quad mix, yes?

So, by this assessment...you could just as easily take a mono mix, and upmix it into a decent stereo mix, yes?

And, by your own assessment...here we are, right back at the point I was making in the first place...by your own assessment. :tiphat:

A lot to unpack here…

First, it’s not my “assessment” you can upmix mono to stereo. It’s a fact. They’ve been doing it for 60 years. Badly most of that time, but much better in the last 10 years or so. But still not “great” IMO, although arguably good enough in 2022 for some applications.

Nor is it my assessment about 4.0 to 5.0 or 5.1 or whatever as you describe. It’s a fact. It’s been done. It’s not that complicated

But has it resulted in an improved outcome? That’s debatable. I would say it’s pointless, at best, to create 5.1 from a quad mix if you have a system appropriate to true quad playback

And that’s a relatively simple task.

My point has never been whether upmix or extraction technology exists - or to a lesser degree, whether it should be done - but about how good is it( or perhaps more accurately, how good is it not)?

Again, my original point was simply I disagree with calling DES true stereo. It’s stereo, maybe even “real” stereo, but just because it’s light years better and a quite different approach than duophonic, it’s not true stereo any more than duophonic is true stereo.

It just semantics, but IMO words have meaning and the distinction is an important one. It’s not a qualitative assessment per se, but rather how the end product is created.

Really isn't. Back in post #35 I said you have your opinion and I have mine. Whaddyasay we back up the bicker-bus, and just agree to disagree. None of this is anything I haven't been saying for the past decade or more, and my observation has been less people with pitchforks and torches shouting "BURN THE WITCH!", and more people just hearing the improvements and saying, "Hey, this is a thing.".

I came to my "by your own assertion" version of the same position from your sentence: "But having said that, it does open up possibilities for creating better Atmos (or whatever the format will be 5-10 years from now) mixes down the road from many old analog multitrack recordings. So yes, I extrapolated from it, that you are open to considering that the techniques work, and can be applied to different soundstage formats. I'm just waiting for you to come to that realization.

But, I think you and I have covered what we need to.