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While checking over my mastering on different devices I noticed that, because of the stereo enhancement I added, that the songs would sound horrible on mono devices like cellphones. I know why this is, that's not the issue, I like where the mastering is at currently.
My question is: Should I even try to adjust it to sound better coming out of mono (like a singular cellphone speaker)? It sounds amazing in stereo.
Yeah I've run into this a bit.
It's kind of a bitch
It's kind of a bitch
finding this out.
Last edited by Auxcide (May 24, 2012 5:57 pm)
People listening on their cellphone's mono speakers are either just showing it quickly to friends or know that it's not gonna have the same quality as with headphones or speakers. I wouldn't really care if I were you 
imho the kind of stereo enhancement that makes things sound bad in mono ("antiphasing" the channels?) is just lazy and doesn't sound great either. try using panning to get stereo interest rather than just adding some magic vst at the end
as you should. fuck it. consumer electronics that are designed to play only mono should already include a stereo-to-mono adapter built in to their circuity. I (as well as the rest of soundsystem culture) run into the same issues when mixing down tracks, originally designed for large systems, for shitty laptop speakers and earbuds and such. The low end action just doesn't come through properly, and it never will on something that can't reproduce frequencies below 150hz.
What I'm trying to say is, it isn't your problem if the person listening to your music doesn't have the proper listening device to hear the music as it was meant to be heard. You can only master for as many different set ups as you humanly can, and hope for the best 
All the stuff I release is mono, but I'm with ant1. Any shortcut you think you might be taking will have some drawbacks.
imho the kind of stereo enhancement that makes things sound bad in mono ("antiphasing" the channels?) is just lazy and doesn't sound great either. try using panning to get stereo interest rather than just adding some magic vst at the end
it depends how the mono speaker deals with stereo input
typically i think mono speakers just merge the two channels together and i suppose that's where a lot of phasing happens. my bass amp on the other hand plays the center of a stereo input normally and any panning just gets translated to a drop in volume.
i think if you're using LSDJ you should definitely try the method that this one guy was talking about a month or so ago and create a separate, mono version of your song so you have a TRUE center instead of a phantom center created by equal parts hard left and hard right. i've been trying to see if there's a good way of doing this without touching the song data in LSDJ, but no luck so far.
My thought is you should only worry about it if phase cancellation is the root of the "problem", since that would also affect stereo playback through speakers. If you were already mastering on speakers, you're probably fine.
well yeah it's weird how stereo effects work because they can be kinda dependent on speaker position and acoustics. also sound different between headphones and monitors - phase inverters in particular are kinda loose cannons in that regard.
Not that I don't like the dynamics, but because of technical issues I record my stuff in mono.
I do mono because my recording stuff refuses to make it stereo, and my prosound comes out mostly mono.
It's whatever though, you can do things to make mono sound similar to stereo.
mono > stereo, ask Alex Mauer.
So what I ended up doing was:
-Master gameboy (center)
-Slave gameboy (center)
-Master gameboy slight pan to the right a miniscule amount of time after (center) master
-Slave gameboy slight pan to the left a miniscule amount of time after (center) slave.
(Both with less volume)
example
Through mono it sounds like a really short delay effect. In stereo it makes the audio wide. I (personally) like how it came out.
