[Frank Stearns]

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

Frank Stearns wrote:

What do you hear with a mono source equally driving both the L and R elements of
your phones? A sound blob left and a sound blob right? Something vaguely in the
middle? Razor sharp in the middle? Just a big puddle?

In the center, it sounds like it's in the center, but as soon as you pan to
the side a little it moves way to the side. It's very much got a "hole in
the center" kind of effect for me.

So this isn't the difference in how the pan circuit or software is implemented,
you're saying this happens consistently with phones for you?

And to clarify - are you saying that it's just about impossible to get, say,
something placed center left or center right with phones, that things tend to snap
way out left or right?

I get a bit of that, but it seems to vary with the pan circuit.

IIRC the pan circuits in the ancient Quad-8 consoles I used last century had a low Z
input source (50 ohm? 100? don't remember) feeding a 5K linear pot with the source
feeding the wiper and the legs feeding the inputs of the summers (20K inputs).

The behavior was not even -- that is, you got a lot of "fine" control of the
"middle" 20 degrees of space spread over the middle 70 degrees of pot rotation, then
things tended to shoot out more rapidly at the extremes.

The pan circuits in my old Soundcraft 200B use dual gang pots (probably log taper),
two variable dividers wired so that one goes up while the other goes down as you
turn it. Seems to provide pretty even panning left through right. The little tiny
Yamaha consoles I carry for field monitoring are much the same, but I don't know how
their pan is wired.

Protools uses a numerical pan scale, 100-0 for full left to center, and also 0-100
for center to full right.

Whatever they've done -- whether or not that scale is truely linear when you compare
the numbers to some sort of spatial construct -- I don't now. But it seems quite
even left through right. Depending on the context, sometimes I can detect "movement"
when the pan value changes by 1, but typically a change by 2 or 3 is required to
sense movement. So this is good; there's a nicely fine resolution available for pan
positioning all the way through.

And while my monitoring is good (LEDE room with soffit-mounted Tannoy SGM10Bs, known
for great imaging because of the dual-concentric point source), I still find it
easier to clearly identify precise pan placement with phones.


For stuff that is stereo miked with appreciable phase imaging, the effect is
even more pronounced.

I'm not sure I follow this... Do you mean that with a stereo image source on phones,
say a proper ORTF or perhaps the Jecklin, you really don't get a center image like
you do on speakers?

When I first started playing with the KM183s spaced at 50cm with the diffraction
spheres, I was taken with how eerily accurate the sound field seemed to be -- but
the effect was most dramatic on phones.

During editing, I'd occasionally listen to people moving around while the recorder
had been running just prior to the gig. You swore you were right back in the
room. Sure, on the monitors you had a good left/right & front/back sense of where
things were, but on the phones it was just spooky as hell.

Anyway. Highly interesting discussion. I'd never realized there seemed to be this
much variability with how phones were perceived. My biggest gripes with most of them
had always been an awful, awful "plastic-like" high mid, with I attributed to driver
resonance with crap materials. I still sense that from many phones, though my
particular Sonys much less so.

The best tonality I'd heard from phones came from a pair of Stax loaned by a friend.
They were like mini-kleenex boxes strapped onto your head. Comfortable -- and
completely impractical for field use, but they provided a wonderful speaker-like
experience.

Frank
Mobile Audio
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