whats the difference between a mono mix and a stereo mix?
 

It seems like mono mixes are outdated and everything these days is stereo, but whats the difference??

audio fidelity ...i think

mono = monoaural = you can only listen to the music thru one speaker.
stereo = stereophonic = listening to music thru two speakers.

in the early days of audio recording and reproduction, it meant the music was recorded and and reproduced in one track recorders and/or players, which essentially meant cramming everything on just one mic and one speaker for playback.

thru the years, recorders started to add more tracks to the recorders (2-, 4-, 8-tracks until the 60's) to have a bigger spectrum and better chances of mixability. until the 60's, though, players could only reproduce on one track (meaning that if people recorded in 2 or 4 tracks, they had to bounce and mixdown those tracks into just one). in the 60's, stereophonic reproduction systems, along with the advent of headphones, came to revolutionize and provide better and truer reproduction capabilities, since using two speakers to play the music, they give a better representation of the sound to the human ears.

EDIT::as noted below, many older recordings where pressed as mono mixes (the only alternative back then). many of those recordings have been re-released on stereo-lps, cassettes, cds, etc. and the quickest and most inexpensive way of transfering mono recordings to stereo where just to copy the one mono mix into another channel and have the same mix simultaneuosly on two speakers (these are called "mono mixes" on reissues which had been treated with the method described next). the other way to transfer mono to stereo was to take the master tapes, recorded on two or more tracks and then processed to be bounced and mixed down to two tracks (with far better results).

mono=every spks sound exactly the same.could be 1 or more.
stereo=2 different sources.

Piper At The Gates Of Dawn sounds fucking AMAZING in mono!
Try it; you'll like it.
They reissued the mono a few years ago, and it's killer.

It's one of my favorite records ever!
then pink floyd really sucked year by year. I think the onlyone with artistic talent in that band was Syd Barrett.

i call poser on this kid

I call not poser.
Next Step is cool as a cuke.
I go with Floyd only up to 1972 myself; can't stand anything after or including Dark Side Of The Moon.

what cuke? my translator says cucumber. that's fine hihihih

I dont know if they are overrated, I never rate them. I think they must changed their name after the first record instead to steal songs and ideas to Syd Barrett. then they continued to meke money up the figure of Syd Barrett, this made them loser in my opinion.

then what I always said is that they construct psychedelic music, syd Barrett made psychedelic sound deconstructing music. different.

So if I bought the Piper at Gates of Dawn CD at Best Buy it would be in mono?

anyways, syd was easily the most artistic but I think the others were very good muscians as well. careful with that axe, eugene is brilliant, as well as set the controls for the heart of the sun, each of these songs coming after Barret...

I'm sure Best Buy would only have the stereo, which is great in any case.
It's just cool to hear how loud and in your face the mix is in mono after hearing the stereo version with all the crazy panning FX for so long. Mono is cool sometimes though. Different animal. Sometimes the mono versions of old rock LPs can be worth way more than the stereo ones.

poser.

Savage Clone: i agree, the floyd until around 1972 is their prime, but it wasn't because of the "madman genius" of syd barrett. after that, pink floyd is not as good, i still like them though; it's just that's very hip to say "pink floyd after syd barrett sucks" because that's what critics and post-punk bands in the late 70's used to say, and people just repete those words, like parrots

your really annoying Everyneurotic....

Yeahl, the wall I don't like as well, I like the time of Pink Floyd with Syd as welll..

I think everyone should hate the wall. and listen to this cover of brick in the wall by sebadoh It's how I feel about the wall. I hate the fuckin wall.
Love relics tho.

woah there, music nazis

I love all of Pink Floyd (not to crazy about The Final Cut though) including The Wall:eek:

i'm not too keen on post wall/roger waters floyd, but i don't dislike the wall, indier-than-thou.

how ironic.

going back to what Savage Clone was saying about some mono mixes sounding better than stereo fixed mixes. i think that most recordings at the time, even if they were recorded on 4 or 8 track machines (like abbey road studios), were thought of to be best heard on one track and tried to create audio depth on one dimention which might account for it sounding so awesome. some records were recorded and thought up to be in stereo but then bounced to mono, losing some of it's magic so when the stereo remixes started, many really showed their true sound then.

i haven't heard any mono mixes so far, i only know the beatles, pink floyd and velvet underground have released mono mixes.