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iturnknobs

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Joined
Aug 2, 2014
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Crystal Lake, IL
Quite often, my vocals sound as if they are coming out of 2 speakers instead of sitting in the middle. Doesn't seem to matter if I listen in stereo or mono. This is noticeable when A/B comparing other mixes. It's not a system, phase or speaker placement flaw/issue.  Is it a M/S mastering chain that accomplishes this... frequency dependent?
 
iturnknobs said:
Is it a M/S mastering chain that accomplishes this... frequency dependent?

Definitely not.

If a dry, mono vocal does not sound like 100% centered and believable then there is some issue.

Stereo image manipulation, too much reverb, too short pre delay, too much delay and cluttered arrangements are all possible contributors.  The last one is the most important.
 
iturnknobs said:
Quite often, my vocals sound as if they are coming out of 2 speakers instead of sitting in the middle. Doesn't seem to matter if I listen in stereo or mono. This is noticeable when A/B comparing other mixes. It's not a system, phase or speaker placement flaw/issue.  Is it a M/S mastering chain that accomplishes this... frequency dependent?
I would say check your speakers for polarity and acoustic path/reflection issues, but you say you don't have this issue with commercial recordings, then I have to assume you have a problem with how your vocal is distributed between left and right. Do you use amixer or ITB?
 
abbey road d enfer said:
I would say check your speakers for polarity and acoustic path/reflection issues, but you say you don't have this issue with commercial recordings, then I have to assume you have a problem with how your vocal is distributed between left and right. Do you use amixer or ITB?

how does your processing chain look? maybe some level mismatch issue? sometimes i find myself accidentally changing levels in the internal fireface mixer
 
iturnknobs said:
Quite often, my vocals sound as if they are coming out of 2 speakers instead of sitting in the middle. Doesn't seem to matter if I listen in stereo or mono. This is noticeable when A/B comparing other mixes. It's not a system, phase or speaker placement flaw/issue.  Is it a M/S mastering chain that accomplishes this... frequency dependent?
If vocals sound like they are coming from two speakers even when playing mono (with similar playback volume), call the patent office.  ;D

+1 to Abbey's suggestion to check polarity.

More obscure, but next measure the frequency response of each speaker for differences that could explain the diffuse localization.

JR
 
If the problem moves with you when you listen on other systems, then it must be something in your chain... 

(assuming you’re mixing in the box) some plugins when in stereo mode make even a mono track sound a bit wide, this can be a good or a bad thing.... so possibly check the mode of your plugins.  Also some engineers will run the vox in its own chain parallel to any of the master bus plugins, in this way you can make sure your vox doesn’t get smushed by your master bus processors and that the vox is mono all the way to the end.

Hope this makes some sense.
 
For the record, when I put one side out of phase going to my spl2489 monitor controller and sum mono there is complete cancellation for any track straight up the middle any other tracks are audible depending on the amount of panning in the mix. I am mixing in a hybrid format, being ITB(Nuendo) and using external inserts. Maybe, like JR said, I need to contact the patent office.
 
If only happens with your vocal recordings (not with commercial ones) then there's something "wrong" in your "chain/acoustics".

Check on headphones and other systems. Easy. If only happens through your monitors there's an acoustic issue in your room. If it happens through headphones and other systems there's an issue within your chain (compressor, eq, plugins, etc)
 
iturnknobs said:
For the record, when I put one side out of phase going to my spl2489 monitor controller and sum mono there is complete cancellation for any track straight up the middle any other tracks are audible depending on the amount of panning in the mix.

I'm guessing since you mentioned mid side, you know how to do this manually , for instance in a mixer, and not just from using a mid side processor of sorts. It's a simple thing and any number of combinations could be going on in your setup. I mistakenly had a similar thing happen when I was building a tube thing and goofed up forgetting where I didn't have inversion going on. Another time, I had mis-wired an interconnect ... Virtual is no different/no difference... :D....
 
Seems like setup to me.

How elaborate is your mix template?  Have you checked to make sure you don't have the LV double assigned to the mix by accident?  Test how the vocal sounds channel to mix out centered and  nothing else. 

This can also happen through auxes being used as duckers and such but feeding to the mix by accident. 

Interfaces like Apollo have there own mixers that can stack to an output with the DAW mixer.  Check to make sure its not duplication with the 2 separate software mixers as well as using reverb or compressors from the interface mixer  back into the DAW mixer.   

This usually creates a phase cancellation with the small delays of the different mixers and channels and so usually is caught because of the nasal quality but in soft level might just cause phase shift. 
 
could be plugin/processing delay or buffer in your DAW freaking out?

'Delay compensation' in ProTools can sometimes do this..

 
How about when listening with the phones? It might be just that the speakers have some odd directivity (not constant) at certain frequencies which cannot be hear on some other program material. Edge diffractions with non-symmetric acoustics and shallow crossover slopes might cause these kind of symtoms.
 
iturnknobs said:
For the record, when I put one side out of phase going to my spl2489 monitor controller and sum mono there is complete cancellation for any track straight up the middle any other tracks are audible depending on the amount of panning in the mix. I am mixing in a hybrid format, being ITB(Nuendo) and using external inserts. Maybe, like JR said, I need to contact the patent office.

That is phase cancellation so I would check your monitor out, your DA, your AD for the vocal track (if its returning from outboard processing) or your track out bus alignment. Do you bus your tracks ITB before sending them out? For me, since I use a console and patchbays, every track in the DAW gets assigned a bus which leaves the DAW onto a seperate corresponding channel on my patchbay and mixer. If I mess up in that process I can get a phase cancellation.
 

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