Is Mono the new advancement in sound? - from Cookie's Corner

[krabapple]

Keep in mind that Toole/Olive use a single loudspeaker in their preference tests, because a single speaker is more revealing of flaws than >1.

 

[Tim Link]

Where I grew up, we did a lot of AM listening when I was a little kid, until FM came along... when was it... mid to late 70s? I was barely a teen, but I remember how good "What a fool believes" sounded through my Dad's stereo with a shiny FM receiver sounded. It was like "Forget the AM stations".

Stereo was magic to me as a kid. FM at night was so amazing. I didn't realize until later that they were compressing the signal earlier in the day for car listening. At night the music would come alive and the stereo effect was mesmerizing. Maybe I'm just jaded to it, but I suspect that with my old ears losing their ability it's harder for me to hear the stereo effect in its fullness. As a kid it seemed like any stereo boom box could produce mind blowing effects for me. Now I need a good room and the speakers placed widely apart. I get a great sense of left to right location still, but not that ethereal something that I used to get that practically made me dizzy.

 

[Tim Link]

Keep in mind that Toole/Olive use a single loudspeaker in their preference tests, because a single speaker is more revealing of flaws than >1.

Stereo hides flaws perceptually.
Sort of related, there's a lot of interest these days in playing old video game consoles on CRT displays. If you don't have a CRT, then you can use a dedicated scaler box that will simulate scan lines and do blank spot insertions and even rolling effects to simulate a CRT. The CRTs tend to hide the pixels and make a lot of that old stuff look better. The black lines let our brain fill in imaginary details.

 

[krabapple]

Stereo hides flaws perceptually.

And multichannel >2, even more so.

 

[levimax]

Seems to me that between soundbars and smart speakers and cell phones mono is by far the most common way music is listened to and that mono is growing in popularity.

I find that for some "real" mono recordings, the ones that were originally recorded in and mixed for mono, especially for simple "girl and guitar" type music, that one speaker mono playback can create a compelling listening experience. For more complicated and enveloping music not so much.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

Stereo hides flaws perceptually.

Is that good or bad?

 

[Tim Link]

Is that good or bad?

For double blind listening tests it might be bad. For listening enjoyment it's good! That's my understanding.

 

[LevityProject]

For double blind listening tests it might be bad. For listening enjoyment it's good! That's my understanding.

There is a cost even for enjoyment listening. Your brain averages out the sounds hitting your ears. Even If there are major design flaws in your speakers, you'll start to think "this isn't so bad after all". It happens in stereo, and it can happen more in surround. If you care about high fideliy, this is a big deal.

Here is the jist. Spatial smearing - it is the loss of precise localization of sounds, because the same sound will arrive from multiple directions at slightly different times and spectra due to inherent design flaws in certain speakers. Not just frequency response, but dispersion and the speakers ability to reproduce sound faithfully in any room.

Your brain won't be able to lock the sound to a single point anymore, so it spreads it out.

Not wider.
Not bigger.
Less precise.