Can you explain this?
I am also surprised by the responses. EVERY post with the stereo vs mono question always gets overwhelming stereo poo-pooing.
Ill try to explain with context, Our whole sound team are volunteers including me. When we did our sound training, we always had live worship and the trainer advised that we just forget about stereo as it isn't appropriate to PA because the audience at the edges can't hear the channel on the opposite side. For this reason and also because our setup currently can't run stereo, we have always run mono. However, over the years I have used gear failures as an opportunity to upgrade and have tried very hard to identify the root cause of various issues which I have tried to address where and when possible within practical constraints. The sound now is pretty clear and natural, we get comments about providing good reinforcement.
Now we are replacing/upgrading our PC and will deliver recorded music via a Radial USB-Pro. I have ripped all the CDs into WAV using EAC and am trying to deliver the cleanest and most accurate source I can within a modest budget. Of course I realise the rest of the system imposes some degradation but as we are replacing the PC, I am taking the opportunity to upgrade this source. Some would call it overkill but I don't think I have been overly excessive with expense in the scheme of things. The desk and EQ will get an upgrade later and I don't want our primary source to be the weak link. So that is the context of where we are at.
Currently the stage is in a corner and I have been educating key people about the acoustic issues this causes. They are coming around to the idea of moving the stage to the middle of an end wall.
This move will allow me to mount the speakers on the side walls just in front of the stage and therefore has the potential to run stereo. Currently they are stacked to give a mono point source for clarity and reduce vertical dispersion loss. The floor is about 12 by 20 metres.
I have been testing out the Radial USB DAC with headphones, just to asses it, There is a stereo/mono switch and it is obvious that certain components of the recording are attenuated in mono, sometimes almost entirely. The most obvious and consistent of these is backing vocals. In Mono, you get the lead and not much else in vocals. Other losses are mentioned in my original post. Music is an art, it is meant to evoke emotion and it seems to me important not to loose that in a ministry of drawing people into worship. Mono is loosing the art. A little research indicated these losses are well recognised as due to timing and phasing differences between L & R channels (phase cancellation). If the speakers are stereo separated L & R, the brain interprets these differences as a sound stage or stereo image. However, if the speakers are together or the audio signals summed to mono, then parts of the sound get cancelled out to varying degrees. This is very obvious listening with headphone due to the improved clarity and channel separation but the principal holds true with speakers as well.
So I began to consider that while the advice to go mono in PA has merit for live sound, it may not be appropriate for stereo sources like CD. I will of course test that out at the church but I just wanted to get some opinions here first as it will take some work to enable a stereo test.
Ken
