SACD - Different Mixing Philosophies

[ringves]

Since purchasing the SACD version of "The Singles", I've also picked up a few other SACD discs (eg. Elton John's "Peachtree Road" and Billy Joel's "The Stranger").

I've noticed that on most other discs that there was a tendency to feed the lead vocal through the center channel speaker only. Furthermore, there would be no other tracks emanating from the center speaker - just the lead vocal, pure and simple.

In the case of "The Singles", Richard generally chose to mix Karen's lead vocal into multiple speakers at the same time. As for the center channel, my recollection is that it usually carries Karen's lead, drums and bass.

In brief, the "separation" is more noticeable on the Elton John and Billy Joel discs. Richard's mix on "The Singles" is more subtle.

I'm going to guess that Richard may have chosen the more subtle approach due to the risk of other parties "lifting" Karen's voice and re-orchestrating past Carpenters' recordings.

Any comments?

 

[Chris May]

That's very possible. Another angle of that is if Karen's voice was solely in the center channel with no bleed-through via reverb and/or panning at either front or rear sides, someone could do some kind of a stereo fold of the instrumental only, and make karaoke bootlegs. Several of the recordings on this disc have never been released instrumentally so I could see where there could easliy be an issue.

Veteran engineer Al Schmidt did all of the technical mixing with Richard's direction. One way to gain more insight into this is to try to find some other multi-channel discs that have been mixed by him to see if it was *his* overall technique and suggestion, or perhaps Richard's call for whatever reason(s). -Chris

 

[GOODY4SHOES]

The "Merry Christmas Darling", "Calling Occupants" and "Only Yesterday" center tracks are quite revealing. Karen's vocal is great of course, but these songs sounds almost dead without Richard's amazing production additions.

YOM is also very interesting to listen to without the harmonies on the chorus.

 

[Rudy]

Veteran engineer Al Schmidt did all of the technical mixing with Richard's direction. One way to gain more insight into this is to try to find some other multi-channel discs that have been mixed by him to see if it was *his* overall technique and suggestion, or perhaps Richard's call for whatever reason(s). -Chris

My theory on surround mixes (and I've heard dozens) is that it is sometimes too "dry" to have only the vocals coming out of the center channel. By having them in all the channels, you can theoretically have a voice "suspended in space" so to speak...IOW, the additional channels can place the voice in a three-dimensional plane, rather than have it sound like it's coming only from one source (the center speaker). Even if it is just a small amount in the four side speakers, it does add some amount of depth to the sound IMHO. (Of course, you need matched speakers to hear this properly. Any change in timbre would ruin the effect.)