The Drums Are In The Middle

Where are the drums in your audiophile soundstage?

They're in the middle.

Which is odd, because in the studio, the drummer is usually in an isolation booth. A very isolation booth. Nowhere near the middle of anything.

In the mix, the drums are always in the middle.

Those are the rules.

Because at a live gig, the drums are always in the middle. (Even in an orchestra.)

Here's your starter for ten. All those speakers on and around that big stage. Stereo or mono?

Nope. Those speakers are mono. Maybe different frequencies from different parts of the speaker cabinet, but all the speaker units are relaying the same thing on both sides. (Unless they want a sound effect.)

Live concert speakers have to be mono, or most of the audience would get a horrible sound experience. Like sitting behind the horns at an orchestral concert.

The soundstage on a CD is not an attempt to present what was in the studio (there's no studio for EDM, for one thing).

It's an attempt to create a kind-of-live experience.

So now you're going to mix the first CD from a new band. There's a limited budget for mixing time. What do you do?

Make all the channels equal, both sides.

Just like it would be at the gig.

Then throw in enough differences to spread the sound between the speakers. Maybe shift the guitar slightly to the right, the bass to the left, the keyboards to the right of the guitar, but keep the sax solo in the middle. Because that's what would happen at the gig. Maybe someone wants the chorus voices to be well to the left and the synth to the right.

Yep that sounds good. Next track.

A bunch of the CDs I have must have been made like that.



And a lot were not.



(YMMV via You Tube and your hi-fi.)

Modern abstract music depends on sound design for its effect. Orchestras have a bias to the right where the horns, cellos and basses are. EDM is designed to swirl around between the speakers. Though the voice is usually in the middle, because that's where we expect the singer to be on stage.

But the results all have one thing in common.

The drums are always in the middle.