| Audio Geeks: Mid-side mojo and questions [message #79141] |
Sun, 28 January 2007 21:59 |
duncan
Messages: 123
Registered: November 2006
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Senior Member |
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OK, not an exclusively "Paris" type question, but not entirely OT
either: I'm mixing some tracks here that were recorded to ProTools by
another guy in a nice Neve room in LA. Tracks are nice and fat...
Trio jazz piano/vocal type stuff... But this piano: tracks are all
set up "Mid - Side"...
So -- I'm an all in the box guy here on my humble Paris system. My
approach for this is to copy the "side" track to another channel, flip
phase, pan the two copies left and right, group those faders and push
them up to taste in combination with the "mid" channel, which is doing
most of the work and is panned -- doh -- center... However, the
session engineer -- an old-school English guy with about 300 times
more experience than I, says he has a better way to decode this. His
way: send the "side" channel to an aux (post fader, pre pan), return
it to another channel in the mixer (set on "input"), leave them both
center panned, the first channel at "0" (nominal gain), then flip
phase and push up the return's fader until it nulls -- which it won't,
actually... (here I say "huh?" and he says "Yeah, it's a ProTools
thing") But anyway, push it up until it "thins out" as far as it's
going to... Then, leave that fader right there forever, pan the
channels left and right, and control levels for both "sides" with the
one fader (of the channel which is sending...). Which works actually
very well -- and *does* sound different and better than the "copy
channels and flip phase" method... But, in a word -- Why...?!
By the way, in order to do this his way on my rig, I'm sending to an
external output -- adat lightpipe looped back to itself -- which is
then patched to another mixer channel which is set to active input...
Probably introducing some itty-bitty latency here which is why the
channels don't null... I'm also going to test this (for kicks) with
analog in and out -- but I doubt things will get any better, as there
would also be a couple more conversions taking place, and who needs
that? One other potential issue: these are 24 bit files at 44.1 --
and I'm wondering if my lightpipe patch for the aux is truncating the
signal to 20 bits? (I know this has been discussed in the past, but
I'm just dumping all the questions in here now in case anybody wants
to actually clarify *everything* for me in one go...)
Thanks, I realize this is rather long-ish... And I'd almost put a
smiley-bob here -- if I actually ever did that sort of thing.
-- chas (thinking about buying all of DJ's stuff, bailing it up, and
sending it into earth orbit as the first truly vintage digital audio
satellite array)
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