Audio experimentation - your ears required and feedback requested!

This is something I've started to ask about elsewhere but I'd like to cast the net a little wider and invite members of RMCR to comment.

Before I explain, here's the link:

http://tinyurl.com/1952LvB9stereo

(MP3 @ 320kbps, duration 4'51", file size 11.1MB)

The recording excerpt is taken from Toscanini's 1952 RCA recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony with the NBC SO. I've remastered it according to regular XR principles, including a very slight repitch to A440 and some light digital noise reduction. The original was of course a mono recording.

Then we come to what some may find the interesting part, and others
the sacrilegious part - the derivation of a stereo spread, of the
ambience only, using a new processing technique called 'K-Stereo' - devised by mastering engineer Bob Katz and implemented by audio
software company Algorithmix*, experts in the field of digital signal
processing.

What the software (and its patent) claims to be able to do is separate
the ambient sound (the natural reflections and reverberation) from the
direct sound in a recording and enable the manipulation of this
ambience. In a full stereo context this allows a mastering engineer to
subtly play with the overall width, depth and other aspects of the
stereo field.

In a mono context, as we have here, it claims to offer a much more
natural way of producing a stereo sound from a mono recording. Unlike
previous methods of doing this, it also claims to be highly
mono-compatible, and not to distort or alter the direct mono sound in
any way. Only the extracted 'ambience' is spread, to a degree
controllable by the user, and this itself is not modified by the
addition of any reverberation or echo that was not originally present
in the recording.

That's the theory. Does it work? Is it natural? Do we want this kind
of thing at all? Well that's why I've been playing with it this
morning and produced this short demo recording for you to listen to
and comment upon.

Please approach this with an open mind - and open ears - before
commenting. There's little point, at this stage at least, in simply
stating one's blanket disapproval of "this kind of thing", as this
will not provoke any genuine discussion of the ideas and techniques
being explored here. That said, I really do want the input of as much
of the group here as possible, as it's a pretty dedicated and
well-educated bunch of people with a wide experience of historic
recordings and their reissues, past and present.

I'm prepared to stick my neck out and state that I do like it.
Switching it on and off (which I can do in the studio with a single
click) demonstrates that it's both quite subtle and pretty believable
(to my ears, anyway) - to the extent that the sound is, I think,
somewhat more natural than the original mono version.

Listening on headphones and switching from mono to stereo and back again, you really do get an excellent sense of space and air without any blurring of the direct signal at all. The more I hear of this the more I like it...

Whether it's a road I wish to go down in the longer run is another
matter, which is why I'm soliciting your responses. Please try and be
as honest and open-minded as possible!




*More details on the software used to do this processing here:
http://www.algorithmix.com/en/kstereo.htm

--
Andrew Rose - Pristine Classical

The online home of Classical Music: www.pristineclassical.com

.

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