The Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" appreciation thre

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i have a good clean stereo copy of the phil spector xmas album, and i can tell you that the muddy mono version sounds to me just like AM radio through a car speaker that has seen better days. the latest mono reissue uses digital treble enhancement techniques to try to increase the clarity, but there is only so much one can do in mono, with everything muddled together.

this said, the original master tapes could not have been too clean in the first place, what with phil's propensity to "push it to 11" IOW he would order his recording engineer to deliberately over-modulate the master tape to get the amorphous sound he wanted. in later years, he noticed a "tearing sound" [his words] in some of the vocals which he butchered in this manner, and he asked his engineer to try to correct it, by muffling the vocal track with unencoded dolby A noise reduction on playback.

still, tearing or no tearing, i wish sony [or somebody in europe] would see fit to reissue this gem in STEREO on CD sometime before i kick the bucket. as current european copyright law stands however, this won't happen until at least 2033.

Strange, just as I saw this thread I was listening to "Don't Answer Me" by Alan Parsons Project. A pretty good song using Wall of Sound.

modern iterations of the old wall-of-sound technique are in stereo/surround. alan parsons didn't do any mono stuff of note.

Just for one album...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v1y0oiUPeM[/youtube]

P. U.

But honestly, Spector could not even ruin that entire album. There are several good songs on End of The Century!

That, my friend, is the power of the Ramones...

one has not heard the phil spector xmas album unless one has heard it in spacious wide stereo sound, as it was originally recorded on 3 tracks, with vocals/special effects one one track, percussions and brass on another track, and strings/miscellaneous on the third track. one can actually hear every single instrument/voice, in clear separation. the spector-approved mono mixdown, OTOH, sounds like a muddy mess, totally amorphous with no separation of instruments whatsoever, in a turbid narrow wodge of sound equidistant between the two stereo speakers, with no lateral spread.

Phil Spector made the definitive Christmas album which I play all day every Christmas without fail.

to each his/her own.

Yes i love him. I have some original 7 inches and i have "the wall of sound" compliation and christmas album.



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCUO7F2xjzw&feature=fvst[/youtube]

i never cared for the term "wall of sound" applied to phil spector's monophonic production technique- a more precise term is "wodge of sound." a real wall of sound would be stereophonic 3-channel, with far left, a fat center and far right.

You sound like you know a lot about sound

thank you jamieboy!
it has been my hobby for most of my life, since my early teens. i spend waaayyy too much time fiddling with audio and DSP of audio. i am glad that somebody thought of this thread, because- aside from phil spector's horrible mono production technique, i loved his xmas album. it is my absolute favorite, at least when i heard the european stereo edition. when i later heard the original mono version, it was a brutally reductionist assault on my ears and i turned it off before the 2nd song.

Nah. I think that misses the point of Phil's "wall." Where ALL frequency ranges are coming at you from everywhere, right and left all at once. The whole point of the technique was that it would sound just as good on your Delco AM car radio as it did on your Hi-fi. A lot of Hi-fi recordings might have sounded great ~ on a hi-fi, but sounded terrible on mono sound systems, which is what most people still had back then.

Interestingly, even today, Music Tech students are taught to intentionally listen to their mixes in mono to see if any frequencies drop out or "cancel." It's a good practice, because what you mix is very often still played on monophonic systems, and if you don't test it in mono, it'll probably sound like garbage it if ever makes it to Muzak in stores.

These days, it's mush easier to create a mix that sounds great in mono, and sounds awesome in stereo. Back when Phil first started mixing, it wasn't so easy. What he did was truly revolutionary, and is still taught in mixing schools, but has become rather obsolete by today's standards.

this is reminiscent of the [rca] dynagroove controversy, where [in the 1960s] RCA records tried to make a recording that would sound good on both proper stereo equipment as well as the cruddiest mono transducers, and it was a giant FAIL. you can't have your cake and eat it too, in this respect- it can sound proper on a proper system, or it can sound a bit better on a mediocre system but not simultaneously good on both types of system. IMHO, mono sounds horrible over anything more than one speaker. for reasons relating to [interactions between] room acoustics and speaker placement, mono is very unforgiving unless it is reproduced from a central point source. on high quality stereo speakers placed in the proper equilateral triangle configuration, mono comes as a narrow wodge of sound equidistant between the two speakers, a very unpleasant sound, especially when the image collapses to the nearest speaker with the slightest lateral head movement- in stereo this collapse is much less apparent. over a more typical configuration where one speaker is next to the potted plant facing one direction, and the other speaker is next to the fish tank facing in another direction, you get comb filtering artifacts normally masked by a stereo recording but revealed in all their ugliness in mono. ironically, many folk set up their audio systems so that only monophonic sound results, namely with the speakers less than 3 feet apart on either side of a tower of audio equipment.
where recording engineers fail, is in the audition of mixes/recordings in which the typical listening environment isn't taken into account. the smarter set uses living-room mock-ups to audition their work in.

Totally agree with this.

But I also have to think about my own music. My obsession as of late is combining laptop-based music with handbell performance, and as a matter of fact my most recent piece also includes as much of a live orchestra as I could get. Sadly, the strings and one percussion part had to be Synclavier--but on the other hand, it sounded GREAT.

One thing I don't get, though, is that really nice stereo spread. I'm not happy about that, but mono is a necessary evil for me. Our church has the house loudspeakers almost directly front-and-center above the pulpit, which means even if you TRY to feed them stereo, it's getting mixed down to mono whether you like it or not. So I chose to take advantage of it--mix everything down to mono or at least don't pan anything, send one channel to the house mixer, one channel to my own personal monitor, and request that the guys upstairs do NOT include handbells in the on-stage monitor mix.

The important lesson we get from Spector, other than "don't kill people," is how much skill it takes to make a really GOOD mono mix. I'm also a product of the 80's, so my first instinct is to overproduce, overproduce, overproduce. I think this same tendency with Spector led to his artistic demise. While getting that overproduced "wall o' sound" and packing a real punch in mono is important, I think Spector would have had greater longevity if he'd accepted more artist input in the process, kept some sense of proportion, balance, and contrast in his later work, and been willing to do SOME panning. A "sound" I enjoy listening to is M/S stereo recording technique. With as many musicians as Spector employed, he certainly might have benefitted from M/S recording--which gives you a beautiful mono mix for radio AND a wide stereo image for stereo systems. If I understand correctly, a lot of radio broadcasts are in M/S anyway.

The point being that Spector was a master of the "wall of sound" and mono recording, and you can learn a lot from that if recording in mono is ever something you're forced to do.

You should always, at some point, listen to your music the way you expect it will be heard, such as your living-room mock-up.

Something else to think about is how sound is heard in terms of how a band or other musical group is heard live. Something I've noticed every time I've ever gone to a live show and every time I've played with my own band in a bar is that the combination of keys/guitars/bass/drums/vocals doesn't really have any kind of spread. Even when I've listened to live orchestras, the acoustics of concert stages and halls are such that I never really hear violins as "left" or cellos as "right." All I really get is the "air" from the natural reverb of the hall, and it's always a much darker sound than what a good recording of the same group might reveal (in a good way, not in a muddy way). Stereo recordings can give you the illusion of space, but what you're really recording is that "air," not so much the dry sound of the band or orchestra. That is, if you're recording it the way it would be heard live. But no one really does that in commercial setups, i.e. outside a college music department.

All that to say I have a preference for stereo recordings myself. But you also have to be mindful of how valuable mono recordings can be. If it sounds good in mono, most likely it's going to sound just fine in stereo.

what you could do if so inclined, would be to get a HUGHES SRS stereo sound expander box and run your stereo feed through it before it gets to the speakers above your pulpit. this is the most sonically neutral stereo expander box i have found, and i have tried them ALL. you could also combine this with a bit of antiphonal sound, in that the difference signal OR the mono signal could be sent either to rear or far-forward speakers in the venue, or you could send a mono signal to the pulpit speakers and the stereo/difference signal to all other speakers. experimentation is the key to finding the best technique. just a jejune thought.