How to fix stereo phase issues with digital recordings

[Fluffy]

61 samples at 44.1kHz = about 1.3ms

So, the channel balance was off by a little more than a foot using speakers.

Retry the original, but move right in your seat a little, it should clear up.

I mostly notice this on headphones, for obvious reasons. Listening on speakers reveal it when I'm sitting dead center between them (which is easy, because I have near field speakers at an equilateral triangle with my listening position).

I have a 3CD set where the tracks are out of phase. Invert one channel, it sounds right again.

Emailed the (budget) record company (about my bargain bin purchase), they said something like "Oh. Yeah. Well. Whatever. Have a nice day".

That's why I don't think I'll bother complaining to anyone.

 

[Fluffy]

DW works with any two tracks, one is a reference, the other a comparison. You can choose the same file for both, and select left channel for reference and right channel for comparison.
View attachment 38038

Thanks for the idea, it works great.

Do you know of a way to accelerate the processing time it takes to match tracks? I timed almost a minute and a half matching two 4:30 tracks. My cpu (i7-7700k at 4.5 ghz) barely got to 50% overall utilization during that time.

 

[pkane]

Thanks for the idea, it works great.

Do you know of a way to accelerate the processing time it takes to match tracks? I timed almost a minute and a half matching two 4:30 tracks. My cpu (i7-7700k at 4.5 ghz) barely got to 50% overall utilization during that time.

Here are some:

DeltaWave is designed to do a lot of different things and to compute many comparisons during a single run. There are a lot of settings giving you control over what’s computed and how. You can turn a lot of options off that are on by default.

DW optimizes the FFT execution (which is the part that takes the most processing) the first time you run it. The second time should be faster.

DW keeps the entire file and all the temporary data in memory, so more available RAM will help speed things up.

If you just want to compute an offset, you don’t need 4:30 size file — 30 seconds is enough and will make it a lot faster. You can tell DW to skip an arbitrary amount from the front or the end of both tracks, reducing the amount of processing necessary.

There are other things (like FFT size, FFT Window, spectrogram size, etc.) that also have an effect on processing speed.

Finally, the more dissimilar the two tracks are the longer DW will spend trying to match them. Left and right channels are not based on the same data, so this caused DW to work much harder.

 

[ajawamnet]

If you look at my rant on my Whole Lotta Love Remix page:

http://www.ajawamnet.com/ajawamnet/remixoflz.html

you'll see a section that I talk about how the stereo drum tracks I got were 8ms off. Whomever dumped the original multitracks did so as stereo FLAC's of mono tracks (really dumb) but I was able to convert these to mono and physically nudge the one track back into alignment

Further on in that page about the Whole Lotta Love remix, you'll see a section that talks about a recent Rhino release from last year of the original rough mix done the night Led Zep tracked the song. It's in reference to where the famous "pre echo" came from (and Kramer was wrong in the Wall Street Journal interview...)

Whomever used the 2 track mix for the Rhino release, didn't set the mastering playback deck's azimuth correctly -

On that page I link to mono audio files (so you can hear the azimuth problem) of what Rhino released and what I did when I fixed it using the Voxengo Audio Delay (I used the older one)

Screenshot of that part of the remix webpage:

The voxengo delay plugin that allow delays of tens of microseconds...
The newer on is on the bottom of the image - https://www.voxengo.com/product/sounddelay/

 

[dped90]

Thanks, but I have little faith that someone would really care about this. It's a little known EP by a niche band, no one would bother remastering it because of this slight error in three tracks… I mostly wanted to get some peace of mind as to why these specific songs sounded off to me.



Do people actually post these kinds of mastering errors on that forum? Do artists\bands ever respond to that?

Tweezing out flaws of little known tracks by little known bands is a huge part of what happens at the steve hoffman forum.
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/ And many who post in this section are no slouches with discerning the causes and suggesting fixes for less than great recordings. https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/audio-hardware.5/

But searching for solutions to the very problem you've apparently now fixed with this software is why I'm very happy to be here at this thread. I'm often suspected that many of my favorite-and even some of the otherwise best engineered-stereo recordings in my CD collection sound smeared, out of balance, full orchestrations on some late 60s A & M recordings (e.g. Dave Grusin) where spacial placement of instruments and vocals may not appear well even through speakers with excellent imaging ability and/or lack sufficient low end because the channels are inverted and/or time delayed.

A friend gifted me a license for Izotope Advanced 5 and an early version of Samplitude Pro X but I've yet to rummage through their tools to see if either of them could fix this same problem as completely and quickly as Delta Wave or another plugin could.

DW works with any two tracks, one is a reference, the other a comparison. You can choose the same file for both, and select left channel for reference and right channel for comparison.
View attachment 38038

Any new software upgrades and/or other ways which might more accurately and quickly identify and (automatically??) correct these defects in stereo recordings?

 

[pkane]

Tweezing out flaws of little known tracks by little known bands is a huge part of what happens at the steve hoffman forum.
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/ And many who post in this section are no slouches with discerning the causes and suggesting fixes for less than great recordings. https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/audio-hardware.5/

But searching for solutions to the very problem you've apparently now fixed with this software is why I'm very happy to be here at this thread. I'm often suspected that many of my favorite-and even some of the otherwise best engineered-stereo recordings in my CD collection sound smeared, out of balance, full orchestrations on some late 60s A & M recordings (e.g. Dave Grusin) where spacial placement of instruments and vocals may not appear well even through speakers with excellent imaging ability and/or lack sufficient low end because the channels are inverted and/or time delayed.

A friend gifted me a license for Izotope Advanced 5 and an early version of Samplitude Pro X but I've yet to rummage through their tools to see if either of them could fix this same problem as completely and quickly as Delta Wave or another plugin could.


Any new software upgrades and/or other ways which might more accurately and quickly identify and (automatically??) correct these defects in stereo recordings?

If you identify phase issues, then some sort of EQ plugin with phase correction will be best to correct for these. DeltaWave will not do this in real time, during playback.