Much like Breezin', this is a title I got on release day, and from the moment I put it on, I was vexed. It was obvious from the outset that the centre speaker was way too loud, but it was also one of those mixes where I used to sit there trying to figure out what instrument was coming from where - sometimes it sounded like something was behind me, or beside me, only to seemingly vanish when I turned my head. Move closer to the left side and 'ooh, I think the guitar is coming from here!' and then move to the right side and the same thing happens. I HATE (HATE HATE HATE) mixes like this, and it's also why I hate matrixed quad recordings, everything sort of floats in the ether and I spend more time trying to discern instrument placement than just enjoying the music.
Having said that, it's my belief that the majority of the time that when someone complains about a mix sounding bad, or wonky, or not making sense, that there's probably some extra factor at play aside from the incompetence of the mixing engineer. For the most part these people are highly skilled, meticulous people who care deeply about their work, so when they do a mix there's almost always a sound internal logic to it. Just for example, I remember reading a review of the quad mix of Mountain's Greatest Hits, and the person said that it sounded like instruments were randomly coming from everywhere, and that the engineer had probably knocked out the mix over a weekend while drinking a 6 pack of beer. Well, we now know that most of the GRT/ABC Q8 tapes suffered from swapped front and rear channels on one side, making everything diagonally panned from each other if not corrected. When you fix the channels on the Mountain Hits Q8, the mix makes total sense with vocals and drums spread across the front two speakers, rather than one front and one diagonally opposite rear speaker.
With that in mind I resolved to have a look at Spectrum, so I ripped the DVD-A and loaded it in to Nuendo. This is what I saw:
Now this is track 4 ('Stratus') but the whole album pretty much looks identical from a waveform point of view. It's clearly obvious that the centre channel is way overpowered, and the rear channels are underpowered. The net result is that the soundfield is totally collapsed - instead of being a perfect circle of sound, it's more like a Christmas tree...or upside down Christmas tree. So using the same method I outlined in the George Benson thread, I set about looking at the channel levels relative to each other using the Voxengo SPAN VST plugin. It confirmed what I saw in the waveforms - on all tracks, the centre channel needs to come down by 5dB, and the rear speakers need to come up by 5dB, and the LFE channel needs to come up by minor varying amounts. This means that in the uncorrected mix, the centre channel is a full 10dB louder than the rear speakers, totally obliterating their impact.
Once I fixed the channel levels, I finally got a chance to listen to the mix properly, and the mix is incredibly...underwhelming, from a surround point of view. This is not an Elliott Scheiner mix, that's for sure. The drums are in all 5 speakers - the main bulk of the kit is found in the centre and rear speakers. This forms a weird triangular sound field - at first I thought maybe the front and rear speakers were reversed, but on track 5 for example, there are conga drums isolated in the rear speakers and the main kit is all up front. The front left and right speakers have china cymbals on one side and crash cymbals on the other. The bass guitar is also presented like this, with dry bass guitar in the centre speaker and bass reverbs in the rear speakers. I think what the mix engineers were going for here was trying to make you feel like you were sitting on the drum throne, but it really doesn't work at all - having snare drums coming out of the rear speakers is just confusing. Instrumentally, I would say 60-70% of this is either 'double stereo' or 'double mono'. Often the keyboards are in all four speakers, but panned subtly to the front or rear - I listened this on headphones, and sometimes the keyboards were only like 10% more in the rears than they were in the fronts. It's such a small difference that it just sounds like everything is coming out of everywhere. Lead instruments (guitar and lead synth for example) are often 'double mono' ie the same signal at the same strength in both FL and RL or FR and RR. Not everything is like this though, there are several moments of good discrete action, including isolated fender Rhodes in the rears on the first track, the aforementioned congas in the rear speakers on track 5, and lots of other flourishes like this. The mix reminds me a bit of the Frank Zappa quad mixes - a lot of 'double stereo' with the occasional discrete flourish.
The two guys who did this mix (Filippo Bussi and Antonio Arena) also did the DTS CD of Cobham's 'Live In Rome' which is also pretty dull surround-wise so I guess they got the Spectrum gig on the strength (ahem) of that. I can't find them credited with doing any other 5.1 music mixes, so I think they must've been pretty new to the whole thing when they did this mix. It's a pretty ham-fisted affair - for example in 'Stratus', the bass guitar is pretty dry in the front speakers, and then about halfway through it gets all reverbed out and you can hear it in the rear speakers too. Or in Quadrant 4, the harmony synth leads at the end of the song don't seem to blend well at all. There are loads of examples of stuff like this in the mix - I'm not sure if it was just a rushed to completion job, or if the mix engineers didn't have the know-how, or if the technology of the time didn't allow for the level of refinement we hear in some of the better surround remixes, but the net result is somewhat underwhelming.
The doubly-bizarre thing about the screwed up channel levels is that Filippo Bussi did both the 5.1 mix, and the mastering. I guess we can only assume the studio monitors at the mastering house were mis-calibrated because there's no way the mix sounds good as it's presented on the disc.
These are the channel alterations I made (in dB):
TRACK__C__LFE__SL__SR
------------------------------
01_____-5__0___+5__+5
02_____-5__+1__+5__+5
03_____-5__+1__+5__+5
04_____-5__+3__+5__+5
05_____-5__+1__+5__+5
06_____-5__0___+5__+5
This balances all the levels. When I was listening to it on my system it still sounded kind of bass shy, and I pumped up my LFE using the controls on my remote by +5dB and things sounded a lot better. So you may want to add 5 more dB to all those LFE figures.
The surround mix might not be stellar, but you can't fault the fidelity - spectral analysis shows content right up to 40k:
And finally, the DR readings from foobar2000, which are very impressive - you don't often see non-classical recordings with DR readings of 16!
foobar2000 1.1.18 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2014-01-31 06:44:13
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: Billy Cobham / Spectrum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR Peak RMS Duration Track
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR14 -0.44 dB -18.43 dB 4:30 01-Quadrant 4
DR15 -0.61 dB -21.15 dB 6:37 02-Searching For The Right Door/Spectrum
DR14 -1.42 dB -20.76 dB 4:48 03-Anxiety/Taurian Matador
DR16 -0.26 dB -24.61 dB 9:53 04-Stratus
DR15 -4.44 dB -25.82 dB 4:14 05-To The Women In My Life/Le Lis
DR16 -0.50 dB -23.84 dB 7:41 06-Snoopy's Search/Red Baron
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Number of tracks: 6
Official DR value: DR15
Samplerate: 96000 Hz
Channels: 6
Bits per sample: 24
Bitrate: 7251 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================
The changes you need to make to this album are small enough (in terms of dB) that you can probably do the changes using the channel level adjustments on your amp if you don't want to get in to multi-track audio software. As with the Breezin' disc, I'd really like to hear how other people think the mix sounds after changing the channel levels!
Coming soon: Pet Sounds and more!
Having said that, it's my belief that the majority of the time that when someone complains about a mix sounding bad, or wonky, or not making sense, that there's probably some extra factor at play aside from the incompetence of the mixing engineer. For the most part these people are highly skilled, meticulous people who care deeply about their work, so when they do a mix there's almost always a sound internal logic to it. Just for example, I remember reading a review of the quad mix of Mountain's Greatest Hits, and the person said that it sounded like instruments were randomly coming from everywhere, and that the engineer had probably knocked out the mix over a weekend while drinking a 6 pack of beer. Well, we now know that most of the GRT/ABC Q8 tapes suffered from swapped front and rear channels on one side, making everything diagonally panned from each other if not corrected. When you fix the channels on the Mountain Hits Q8, the mix makes total sense with vocals and drums spread across the front two speakers, rather than one front and one diagonally opposite rear speaker.
With that in mind I resolved to have a look at Spectrum, so I ripped the DVD-A and loaded it in to Nuendo. This is what I saw:
Now this is track 4 ('Stratus') but the whole album pretty much looks identical from a waveform point of view. It's clearly obvious that the centre channel is way overpowered, and the rear channels are underpowered. The net result is that the soundfield is totally collapsed - instead of being a perfect circle of sound, it's more like a Christmas tree...or upside down Christmas tree. So using the same method I outlined in the George Benson thread, I set about looking at the channel levels relative to each other using the Voxengo SPAN VST plugin. It confirmed what I saw in the waveforms - on all tracks, the centre channel needs to come down by 5dB, and the rear speakers need to come up by 5dB, and the LFE channel needs to come up by minor varying amounts. This means that in the uncorrected mix, the centre channel is a full 10dB louder than the rear speakers, totally obliterating their impact.
Once I fixed the channel levels, I finally got a chance to listen to the mix properly, and the mix is incredibly...underwhelming, from a surround point of view. This is not an Elliott Scheiner mix, that's for sure. The drums are in all 5 speakers - the main bulk of the kit is found in the centre and rear speakers. This forms a weird triangular sound field - at first I thought maybe the front and rear speakers were reversed, but on track 5 for example, there are conga drums isolated in the rear speakers and the main kit is all up front. The front left and right speakers have china cymbals on one side and crash cymbals on the other. The bass guitar is also presented like this, with dry bass guitar in the centre speaker and bass reverbs in the rear speakers. I think what the mix engineers were going for here was trying to make you feel like you were sitting on the drum throne, but it really doesn't work at all - having snare drums coming out of the rear speakers is just confusing. Instrumentally, I would say 60-70% of this is either 'double stereo' or 'double mono'. Often the keyboards are in all four speakers, but panned subtly to the front or rear - I listened this on headphones, and sometimes the keyboards were only like 10% more in the rears than they were in the fronts. It's such a small difference that it just sounds like everything is coming out of everywhere. Lead instruments (guitar and lead synth for example) are often 'double mono' ie the same signal at the same strength in both FL and RL or FR and RR. Not everything is like this though, there are several moments of good discrete action, including isolated fender Rhodes in the rears on the first track, the aforementioned congas in the rear speakers on track 5, and lots of other flourishes like this. The mix reminds me a bit of the Frank Zappa quad mixes - a lot of 'double stereo' with the occasional discrete flourish.
The two guys who did this mix (Filippo Bussi and Antonio Arena) also did the DTS CD of Cobham's 'Live In Rome' which is also pretty dull surround-wise so I guess they got the Spectrum gig on the strength (ahem) of that. I can't find them credited with doing any other 5.1 music mixes, so I think they must've been pretty new to the whole thing when they did this mix. It's a pretty ham-fisted affair - for example in 'Stratus', the bass guitar is pretty dry in the front speakers, and then about halfway through it gets all reverbed out and you can hear it in the rear speakers too. Or in Quadrant 4, the harmony synth leads at the end of the song don't seem to blend well at all. There are loads of examples of stuff like this in the mix - I'm not sure if it was just a rushed to completion job, or if the mix engineers didn't have the know-how, or if the technology of the time didn't allow for the level of refinement we hear in some of the better surround remixes, but the net result is somewhat underwhelming.
The doubly-bizarre thing about the screwed up channel levels is that Filippo Bussi did both the 5.1 mix, and the mastering. I guess we can only assume the studio monitors at the mastering house were mis-calibrated because there's no way the mix sounds good as it's presented on the disc.
These are the channel alterations I made (in dB):
TRACK__C__LFE__SL__SR
------------------------------
01_____-5__0___+5__+5
02_____-5__+1__+5__+5
03_____-5__+1__+5__+5
04_____-5__+3__+5__+5
05_____-5__+1__+5__+5
06_____-5__0___+5__+5
This balances all the levels. When I was listening to it on my system it still sounded kind of bass shy, and I pumped up my LFE using the controls on my remote by +5dB and things sounded a lot better. So you may want to add 5 more dB to all those LFE figures.
The surround mix might not be stellar, but you can't fault the fidelity - spectral analysis shows content right up to 40k:
And finally, the DR readings from foobar2000, which are very impressive - you don't often see non-classical recordings with DR readings of 16!
foobar2000 1.1.18 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2014-01-31 06:44:13
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: Billy Cobham / Spectrum
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR Peak RMS Duration Track
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR14 -0.44 dB -18.43 dB 4:30 01-Quadrant 4
DR15 -0.61 dB -21.15 dB 6:37 02-Searching For The Right Door/Spectrum
DR14 -1.42 dB -20.76 dB 4:48 03-Anxiety/Taurian Matador
DR16 -0.26 dB -24.61 dB 9:53 04-Stratus
DR15 -4.44 dB -25.82 dB 4:14 05-To The Women In My Life/Le Lis
DR16 -0.50 dB -23.84 dB 7:41 06-Snoopy's Search/Red Baron
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Number of tracks: 6
Official DR value: DR15
Samplerate: 96000 Hz
Channels: 6
Bits per sample: 24
Bitrate: 7251 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================
The changes you need to make to this album are small enough (in terms of dB) that you can probably do the changes using the channel level adjustments on your amp if you don't want to get in to multi-track audio software. As with the Breezin' disc, I'd really like to hear how other people think the mix sounds after changing the channel levels!
Coming soon: Pet Sounds and more!
