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Regarding Beatles L+R stereo, isn't reducing channel seperation a more straight-forward way of addressing the problem. I tried this with foobar and Rubber Soul (~30-40% seperation) and, at the time of writing, prefer it over foobar's crossfeed plugin. A proper hardware crossfeed may sound better though. |
A straight stero blend adds little to the problem of early stereo recordings where most engineers had no actual clue what the blumlein method of stereo reproduction was meant to achive.
Rather than have left signal meld into the right and right signal meld to the left with natuaral phasing and frequency manipulation as would occur with the Blumlein Mic Technique in a live recording they instead grouped all of certain things in one channel and all the rest in the other.
There is no center image but two distinct mono images that with headphones can not blend as the would with speakers where the sound from each reaches both ears.
Blending this does not make it stereo but closer to mono and any image as bad as it is destroyed.
So what is the crossfeed ?
Simply put a frequency dependant blend that operates from the middle bass area up to the high end area.This blend is not an "all or nothing" deal but a mild effect attemtping to reconstruct what you hear with loudspeakers playing the same cut.
Because it IS a filter and because the two channels have identical filtering added to each other there will be some comb filtering and frequency dependant losses going on which are not strictly helpful so it is up to the listener to decide if the tradeoffs are of value.
I personall use a crossfeed with certain recordings but is is so mild it is barely noticeable for being there but the increased stereo soundfield it creates is a plus mostly.
Since I also have "in system" tone controls and adjustable filters I simply tweak the signal for best sound in combination with the XFD device for best overall musical enjoyment and care not what the scope plot would look like.
Looking at my settings I have a +3 dB boost @ 12 khz,a -2dB dip at 250 hz and a +6 dB boost at 40 hz which is used with a crossfeed having the dominant pole at 300hz.
different strokes but my thought is it is always nice to have the nmeans to adjust/change a parameter and not need it than it is to need it and not have it so my system includes all types of signal "tweekers" for those cases where settling for a bad recording that has good music content just will not do if enjoying the music is the end goal.
Rickster