So, you know me always playing the revisionist historian here but I've been playing with this album trying to figure out what happened.
Firstly, the channels are all over the place. I've found the best is to put the two channels with the loudest bass in the front and the two channels with the loudest drums in the rear. This sort of jives with the early RCA cartridges, like the Guess Who's with bass in the front, drums out back.
But there's still something wrong, I wish I could show a picture of it from Audition, but it's so minute, I can't really show it visually. But the channels are out of sync! Not by much, but enough that:
A) It's very noticeable as there is no really defined phantom center channel
B) since the vocals are in all channels, there's no phase cancellation.
I think B) is the smoking gun. My speculative theory is that during duplication, not only did they mess the channel assignments up, they may have had some weird phasing issue. Delaying (what were essentially, NOW) the rear channels by 6 milliseconds killed that issue. But in the process, they cocked the whole bloody thing up! Like I said, 6 milliseconds is hard to show graphically. But by trying every trick in the book with this album, delaying certain channels by exactly .006 seconds made the vocals sound correct and emanate from a phantom center channel!
Through this process, I've also noticed some songs with ample instrumentation go four-corner discrete. Other songs that are more sparse still keep the drums and bass in the center channels, but go for the classic RCA "four-walls" style with say, backup girls in both lefts and strings in both rights.
One song I did have to invert the rear channels completely to stop a phasing issue..... like I said, this album is all over the place. But, I believe I'm on the right track to cracking it's code!
Firstly, the channels are all over the place. I've found the best is to put the two channels with the loudest bass in the front and the two channels with the loudest drums in the rear. This sort of jives with the early RCA cartridges, like the Guess Who's with bass in the front, drums out back.
But there's still something wrong, I wish I could show a picture of it from Audition, but it's so minute, I can't really show it visually. But the channels are out of sync! Not by much, but enough that:
A) It's very noticeable as there is no really defined phantom center channel
B) since the vocals are in all channels, there's no phase cancellation.
I think B) is the smoking gun. My speculative theory is that during duplication, not only did they mess the channel assignments up, they may have had some weird phasing issue. Delaying (what were essentially, NOW) the rear channels by 6 milliseconds killed that issue. But in the process, they cocked the whole bloody thing up! Like I said, 6 milliseconds is hard to show graphically. But by trying every trick in the book with this album, delaying certain channels by exactly .006 seconds made the vocals sound correct and emanate from a phantom center channel!
Through this process, I've also noticed some songs with ample instrumentation go four-corner discrete. Other songs that are more sparse still keep the drums and bass in the center channels, but go for the classic RCA "four-walls" style with say, backup girls in both lefts and strings in both rights.
One song I did have to invert the rear channels completely to stop a phasing issue..... like I said, this album is all over the place. But, I believe I'm on the right track to cracking it's code!