Mono to Stereo

[Bill Davis]

Definitions are in order:

Mono – one mic – one audio stream. Simple, forgiving, universal.

Mono split to two tracks – fine IF everything stays perfectly in sync.
(God forbid one of your mono tracks slips out of phase with respect to the other If so, the quality of ALL your audio on playback will be TERRIBLE based on phase cancellation. This happened to me on the initial public showing of a friends resume feature film. He mixed it -wrong. The result was HORRIBLE. And of course eveyone kept glancing at ME wondering why the sound was so awful.

Stereo. – two distinct audio streams. This can be the result of capturing the signals of two separate micropohones (or one stereo mic) – or from someone taking mono and/or stereo signals and panning them into the stereo output perspective. This can be lovely, horrible, or a constantly changing mixture of the two. Done properly it yeilds a sense of spaciousness and depth that mono recordings just don’t have. Done improperly, you can suffer phase problems that come and go rather than stay consistent.

Note that only MONO recordings, played back in MONO are naturally immune to phase problems.

That’s why I deliver 99% of my work as Mono unless otherwise instructed.

I’ll happily sacrifice a bit of spacious sounding wide screen effect for the knowledge that none of the center voice content is going to get screwed up because somebody in the mastering suite or at the playback venue didn’t know enough to keep the right/left house wiring in phase.

My 2 cents – YMMV.

[Jean-christophe Boulay]

Just chuck your audio into Soundbooth as mono and bounce the resulting project to stereo interleaved or split stereo, depending on what you need for the laybacks. Don’t do anything like trying to use “mono-to-stereo” effects or plug-ins or putting the same audio on two tracks and panning them. That opens the possibility for many headaches later on, while usually sounding like total cr@p.

Your final file will contain mono sound in a stereo file. You won’t gain any spaciousness and you couldn’t possibly gain that anyways, since you only recorded with one mic.

As for levels, you’re opening a nice big can o’ worms. What will your delivery format be? Will it be broadcast? If so, where? Depending on the answers to these questions, your delivery levels can change by as much as 20 dB, so you’ll need to be more specific.

IHTH

JC Boulay
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com

[Eric Naylor]

Thanks for the advice guys.

My final output will be for the web (probably vimeo) and a dvd and/or blu-ray disc.