I was out on a bike yesterday and by chance caught an old
Goon Show from December 1957 on 4 Extra. I was quite taken by a charming bluesy jazz piece played by the Ray Ellington Quartet during the show.
So for fun when I got home, I ripped the audio from BBC Sounds. For a 1957 recording, it already sounded pretty good. Mono, of course.
I put it through an online AI splitter and got three tracks - the bass, the drums and "music" which in this case is a harmonica and horns with a bit of piano.
I loaded them into Audacity, panned the bass to the right a bit and the drums to the left - it already sounded like a decent stereo recording. But following a bit of research I tried another enhancement: I duplicated the "music" track into two tracks and put a micro delay on one of them - just like one of your ears would get in a three-dimensional space. I also boosted the bass slightly on the other. Then I panned them left and right respectively.
I also EQ-ed the bass to make it a bit more punchy and brought it and the drums up in the mix slightly. It's worked out quite nicely! I've uploaded it to YouTube (below).
This would have been science-fiction in 1957 of course. No studio or expensive mixing equipment, just an ageing nerd with a Linux box and time on his hands.
Sounds good, and the music is lovely.
Was there anything wrong with the mono recording that prompted this? I have a lot of mono LPs that sound fantastic, usually better than their (fake) stereo counterparts.
Nothing "wrong" with it - it sounded good for the 1950s. I did it partly because I thought the drums and bass - subjectively - sounded a bit weak. And because it would be a nice experiment.
I do think it sounds better in stereo personally.