Is Sound Stage an artifact of recording?

@sparksgja  @trivema  Nice article and good comment. I've got new respect for mono.

Sorry I wasn't clear. Some of the very best recordings of symphonic music are done with two microphones only, as well as a bunch in the late 1950's and 1960's jazz. 

I moved on to a recording that is not either of those and want to recommend the recording of Joe Jackson that captures the best of ambience and instrumentation. Body and Soul. 

Live Amplified Show, Large Auditorium: Horrible, we moved, GREAT.

We got free tickets to Willie Nelson at the State Theater, New Brunswick, Nj.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FFSTMN5w_7M

Tickets in our name at the box office, we didn’t know they were way way up, and way way back, the sound was the worst EVER!

between sets, I grabbed Donna, went down to the floor, saw a few empty seats right in front of the sound board, acted like I owned the place, sat down, wow, the sound was awesome.

@bruce19 Your example of recording a solo guitar and singer illustrates my point perfectly but not in the way you may have thought. I've recorded hundreds of tracks of singer/guitar and I've tried a range of microphone setups and locations. If you want to attempt to recreate what you would hear if you sat 10' away from someone singing and playing the guitar you might think that one or two microphones placed at your listening position would do the trick. What you will find is that this setup sounds flat and lifeless. Your interpretation would be that this is a crappy recording even though, theoretically, it should most closely match what you heard.

In order to achieve the sound one might expect to hear when you get a professionally produced and recorded album I would use two different mics for the guitar - one condenser mic about 6" from the sound hole, and a second mic about 4" from the fretboard. I would use a third large diaphram condenser mic for the vocals but I would nearly always record the vocals separately from the guitar tracks so the vocals and guitar don't bleed into the other tracks.

Once the tracks are recorded I would do the mix. Mixing would include EQ'ing each track, adding delay and reverb custom for each track for a pleasant "room acoustic", and then adding any other effects on the whole mix.

The result of this process is to create the illusion that you are sitting 10' away from a human playing an acoustic guitar and singing. It is an artificial facsimile of what you think you heard in the real world.

To be fair, there have been thousands of great recordings using a minimal number of microphones in a carefully controlled acoustic space. This is really hard to do and impossible even in most recording studios. On the other hand we can hear what this technique sounds like for singer/guitar on old blues recordings. These used a single mic with no EQ or processing. By today's standards they don't sound very good.

My point still stands that the vast majority of recordings do not attempt to recreate live sound from a single listening point. People simply wouldn't buy them because they don't resemble what we now think of as "high fidelity."

I second the people who comment that concerts are generally a "mono" event...especially if its a big show through a PA system or even an orchestra without amplification but you are seated 20 rows back.

Now you might get the sensation of drums behind the front wall of sound...and you may get a left right sensation...but its not very often, if ever, that you hear what can be projected from a 2 channel stereo set up in terms of soundstage, imaging and depth.

On the other hand, a home audio system, rarely if ever, can capture the slam and intensity of live music and its dynamics...so in my view, both can be equally enjoyable while producing "different" sonics.