Great Mistakes #10

One of the great rules we have at our work place is “always check it in mono”. Because as much as I hate to admit it, we broadcast in mono. Yes we go to all sorts of effort to make programs with the highest quality of audio possible and we make a lot of effort to do beautiful music mixes and it all ends up in glorious mono on AM. HOWEVER, we now have digital radio in STEREO. YAY.

Anyway, I once was responsible for Sarah Blasko going to air out of phase. Now what happens when something is out of phase? All of the mono information cancels itself out when you mono the signal so all you get left with is the stereo information. So for speech, this means you get zilch. For music it means everything that you had panned centre get cancelled out. So you get no voice, just the reverb. This is what happened with Sarah Blasko. She sounded like she was singing out the back in a very large bathroom.

I had prerecorded her in the studio doing a couple of songs for the music show. We usually go live to air with these things, but for some reason we pre recorded the day before. And because it was pre recorded she made mistakes and had to redo things which meant I had to do some editing in wavelab. That’s why going live is so much better – no chance to do things again so people make sure they don’t stuff up.

Anyway I edited it up and rendered the session and by some freak thing, it rendered out of phase. I know this wasn’t my fault because I checked the edit session later on and it was in phase. So wavelab had stuffed up. I was sitting in the studio when it was being played to air and it sounded ok because we were listening in stereo, and weren't paying too much attention to it - if we'd been listening properly we would have noticed it sounding out of phase. But the Melbourne producer who was listening off air in mono came on line saying “what’s going on with the sound, she sounds really distant and echoey?” The other engineer and I immediately knew what this meant – it was out of phase. Poor Sarah Blasko. She got fixed before the song finished but for a while there she was just a wash of reverb with some guitar. Excellent