blissblogger
Well-known member
reading nyc musician/writer alan licht's amusing monograph An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, all about him as jim o'rourke-esque noisenik rediscovering his teen love of mtv pop, although the best stuff is actually on the 90s (what a strange time, groups like the melvins signed to major labels), but what caught my eye is this passage, it expresses an opinion i've never encountered before. Talking re. the decline of music, he opines:
"The beginning of the end, though, was the introduction of stereo. Contrary to popular wisdom, mono is much truer and more powerful sound replication than stereo. Just check out any Stones, Beatles or Dylan record from the Sixties in mono--the sound is thicker and more focused.... Multitracking diffuses the sound, separating it into little subdivisions that you have to put back together again in the mix, then repositioning them, by panning, like layering cells in animation, is crazy. When you listen to a mono mix there's a depth of field, like there is when you watch a movie. That's lost in a stereo mix. In fact i'd even suggest that rock's slide into corporate culture began with the introduction of stereo. The music is ill-suited for stereo, and even worse for digital sound. Rock was forced to comply with an industry standard that cut its sonic power in half (literally). I only recently learned that most club PA systems are in mono. This illuminates at least part of my preference for live music as opposed to records, and accentuates the directness of the live experience."
the only time i've encountered an opinion of this lsort, it's a writer who says the mono mix of A Piper at the Gates of Dawn is much more rich and vivid than the stereo mix.
So, any truth in the above, you reckon?
"The beginning of the end, though, was the introduction of stereo. Contrary to popular wisdom, mono is much truer and more powerful sound replication than stereo. Just check out any Stones, Beatles or Dylan record from the Sixties in mono--the sound is thicker and more focused.... Multitracking diffuses the sound, separating it into little subdivisions that you have to put back together again in the mix, then repositioning them, by panning, like layering cells in animation, is crazy. When you listen to a mono mix there's a depth of field, like there is when you watch a movie. That's lost in a stereo mix. In fact i'd even suggest that rock's slide into corporate culture began with the introduction of stereo. The music is ill-suited for stereo, and even worse for digital sound. Rock was forced to comply with an industry standard that cut its sonic power in half (literally). I only recently learned that most club PA systems are in mono. This illuminates at least part of my preference for live music as opposed to records, and accentuates the directness of the live experience."
the only time i've encountered an opinion of this lsort, it's a writer who says the mono mix of A Piper at the Gates of Dawn is much more rich and vivid than the stereo mix.
So, any truth in the above, you reckon?