Updated - Movin to Sante Fe with Fruition - Mix 5

[Mixinthecloud]

Here's what I read. [https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/vi...s-for-you/] Keep in mind this was a quick search. I can't speak to the accuracy of the site and frankly I haven had much experience with vinyl albums in years.

"Until very late in the 1950s, all records were mono (one channel). On a mono record, the stylus tracks lateral movement (side-to-side squiggles) only — the groove is a consistent depth. When record companies saw a market for two-channel stereo recordings, the vertical dimension of the groove (up-and-down hills and valleys) was right there for the taking!

But the most obvious solution — to use “lateral” as one channel and “vertical” as the other — presented at least two problems. For one, it would make stereo records incompatible with mono turntables (you’d only get one side instead of a summation of both). Another challenge: Large vertical excursions (hills) make for difficult tracking. The last thing we want is a ramp that launches the stylus right out of the groove!

Ultimately, a brilliant solution was conceived, albeit one requiring a bit of clever mathematics. With a little pencil-pushing, “left” (L) and “right” ® channels can be rearranged as “mid” (M) and “side” (S).

“Mid” contains everything that’s the same in both L and R, and “side” contains everything that’s different between them. To encode into mid-side: (L+R)/2 = M and (L-R)/2 = S. To decode back into stereo, M+S = L and M-S = R. It might seem strange, but it works!

If the stereo signal is converted into mid/side for cutting, both aforementioned problems are solved. The “mid” channel moves in the lateral side-to-side dimension, resulting in perfect compatibility on a mono player. Remember: M = (L+R)/2. The “side” signal moves in the vertical dimension, and as long as bass frequencies are kept in-phase and close to the middle of the stereo field, there will be few large vertical excursions (read: “launch ramps”).

If you’ve ever encountered a Fairchild 670 stereo compressor (or one of the many plugin emulations), you may have noticed that its mid-side mode is called “LAT/VERT.” This stands for “lateral/vertical” and betrays the Fairchild’s early history as a disc-mastering compressor!

Even still, some rare types of stereo signal — phase issues and hard-panned bass frequencies, chiefly — can be challenging for your mastering engineer to cut. But a good engineer will have a few tricks up their sleeve to deal with even these rare circumstances."

Thanks. I learned something. So many limitations that vinyl created and as a direct result shaped modern music's presentation. M/S, outside of disc mastering was always a way of post producing a stereo image when I was doing analogue recording, and even then it was rarely used maybe owing to the rarity of figure 8 mics. No, I did not have Neumans, or 414s or the like. Plus the patching and phase flipping. A real pain in the butt. Now, M/S is an enhancement on almost every mastering chain, not for compatibility but for sweetening and driving width. A completely different approach yet with some retaining the ability to filter low end so it remains mono-fied. That is the deference to convention from years of necessity of placing the low end in the middle only to allow the medium to convey it. Imagine what popular music would be like today if that constraint was never there.

I did a jazz mix on here a while back and placed the bass off to the side because that's where it seemed to be on the stage and sound field. I caught hell for it! I did not change it, however.