Subject:four speaker playback

Posted by: aelson

Date:2/29/2004 4:10:31 AM

I've recorded a number of interviews over the years using a variety of microphones and recorders, but usually with a stereo mike and either a mono or a stereo Sony walkman type recorder. Now I'm digitizing the interviews and putting them on CD using Sound Forge 7 in the Scott Studios .wav format. A listener to one of the CDs says when he played the CD in his car system, sound only came out of one of his four speakers, which he found understandably disconcerting. I've noticed when I digitize the interviews, virtually all of the sound is on the top track and the bottom track is sometimes a flatline (mono recording?) and sometimes has just minimal peaks and valleys. My question is, is there a way I can make the recording play in more than one channel if it indeed was recorded in mono?

Subject:RE: four speaker playback

Reply by: Chienworks

Date:2/29/2004 5:44:23 AM

Simply save it as a mono file. If you want to be more complex, you could use Process / Channel Converter to convert to mono first and then renormalize, but there's probably no need.

Just curious, but is there any reason you're using the Scott Studios format instead of Microsoft WAV?

Subject:RE: four speaker playback

Reply by: aelson

Date:2/29/2004 11:07:45 AM

Boy am I glad you asked that!!!! I was wondering myself why I was using the Scott Studios wav instead of the Microsoft wav, and was about to ask this forum which one is the better one to use, or if there was a difference? The Scott Studios seems to work, I just hadn't tried the other. What do you think?

Subject:RE: four speaker playback

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:2/29/2004 12:20:07 PM

aelson,
It's pretty obvious from your original post that you truly don't have a grasp on the difference between mono and stereo recordings. The first being, why would you ever use a stereo mic to record an interview? The only reason you would ever do this is if you're interviewing more than one person and you're sitting in the middle with one person to your left and the other to your right and then upon playback you want to be able to tell where each person was located. Stereo means there are 2 discreet different signals being recorded and when you playback the signal, you want to be able to tell where between the Left and Right speaker the sound is coming from. So for your interview there was probably only 1 discreet sound source, the persons mouth. So unless the person has 2 mouths using a Stereo mic is not a very smart thing to do, because it will pick up a lot of background noise. You use a stereo mic when you're trying to capture something like a live music performance. For instance let's say you're recording an orchestra. If you close your eyes and listen to the performance, you can tell the flute section is to your right, The violin section is to your left, the Saxophones may be slightly right of the violins, and the percussion is directly in the center. Now you have many different sound sources and you want to be able to tell where they where located when you listened to them in the theatre. So you would use a stereo mic, so you can record 2 different signals, the discreet right, and discreet left.

Use the Microsoft .Wav format. Scott Studios is a special broadcast wave format used for special cases. They are both the same quality, the Scott Studios just has some additional information, but may make it incompatible. The Microsoft .Wav format is the one most people use and is the preferred supported one.

Another thing is, that if these are only voice recordings you should probably record them into sound Forge in the MONO format to start from. Even if the recording is mono it will still play out all four speakers. The problem is that you recorded it as stereo and there was no signal in the Right channel and only the Left. When you record in MONO Sound Forge will put that 1 signal into both the right and left channels on the CD. It will be exactly the same signal so when you play it back the Left speaker will be playing the exact same signal as the Right speaker, so the sound will appear as it's coming from the middle.

Subject:RE: four speaker playback

Reply by: aelson

Date:2/29/2004 7:53:58 PM

Thank you! You're right as to me not having had much of a clue about stereo recording, when I began doing this 15 years ago I thought if I used a stereo mike it would sound better (duh). I'm thankful I had the good sense to ask in this forum relatively early in the digitization of the 700 hours of audiotaped interviews with World War II veterans I've recorded over the years. Now, how do I get Sound Forge to record in mono? I tried looking in the save-as, but couldn't figure it out.

Subject:RE: four speaker playback

Reply by: Rednroll

Date:2/29/2004 11:47:53 PM

When you click on the record button, and the record window pops up, then click on the "NEW" button. There will be two dots, one says MONO, the other says STEREO. Click on the MONO one, and the file you record will then be mono. If you're doing this to 700 hours of recordings, then you'll also thank me later, because recording in MONO will take up half the amount of space on your computer than if you recorded in Stereo, which is unneccesary for what you're doing.