Ed Littman wrote on Fri, 11 March 2005 19:17 |
dcollins wrote on Fri, 11 March 2005 18:19 |
Because anything you do to make it "wider" is going to cause the center to suffer.
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with the exception of the Dangerous box. I don'tknow how they do it but I heard no loss in the center. Ed
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Ed, if the Dangerous is a true M/S widener, it's technically impossible not to get center loss. As the S goes up, the center goes down. Test it out with test tones and try to psyche out what they're doing.
I feel obligated to put in a plug here for the K-Stereo processor. It increases ambience, depth and apparent separation and definition of the instruments with no effect on the center. For example, if the snare drum was recorded in the original mix with reverb and the vocal "dry", then the snare will pull back and get "wetter" while the vocal will stay relatively up front. It's exactly like having a handle on the reverb returns in a mix after the mix is over. You can even adjust the tonality of the original reverb, which is very helpful if someone mixed with a cheesy reverb and you would like to make it warmer. Instead of equalizing the direct sound, you equalize the reverb and the results can be very pleasing. I'll leave that up to your imaginations.
Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The wetter you make a recording AFTER a mix has been done, you are changing the original balance. The more diffuse and less defined becomes the vocal, for example if you are pulling it back relative to the ambience. But this mix change has nothing to do with the problems that you encounter when you increase an S channel. Au contraire. K-Stereo is extremely immune to those problems.
But it sure helps to get a more u-shaped presentation in a rather flat-sounding mix and by virtue of the psychoacoustics involved, the sound usually has more definition of the internal elements.
BK