Question: “Stereo” out of a mono PA system?

[cassdad]

Background:  I’m a big “got to hear my digital piano in stereo” because I think it sounds incomparably better than in mono.  So… I handed 2 XLRs to the sound guy, “telling him to pan one full left and pan the other full right”.  He responds to me that his PA / FOH mixer “is not stereo, it’s mono, so it won’t make any difference”.  I told him to please just make me happy and do it.  And I’m told it sounded great in the venue.

Question:  For you “live sound” experts:  Is panning an input full left or right any different in a mono system than a stereo system?  Specifically - If I put the left channel of my piano into input #5 and pan it full left, and the right channel from my piano into input #6 and pan it full right - won’t that still result in true stereo at the FOH?  (As long as the mixer has separate left and right outs). In other words - if the mixer has a “pan” control, can stereo still be accomplished even in a “mono” system?  (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mixer without a pan control.)

[mate stubb]

Short answer: No. While the mixer may be stereo capable, the entire rest of the PA must also have a stereo path in order to achieve it. Somewhere in the system, it's either getting summed to mono, or everything panned hard to one side is getting lost entirely.

 

So your 2 piano signals were either summed to mono and fortunately did not get a bunch of phase cancellation OR you were hearing only one side. Fortunately it worked out. Since you are likely to encounter this again, it would be good to figure out exactly how things were set up.

[cassdad]

4 minutes ago, matted stump said:

Short answer: No. While the mixer may be stereo capable, the entire rest of the PA must also have a stereo path in order to achieve it. Somewhere in the system, it's either getting summed to mono, or everything panned hard to one side is getting lost entirely.

 

So your 2 piano signals were either summed to mono and fortunately did not get a bunch of phase cancellation OR you were hearing only one side. Fortunately it worked out. Since you are likely to encounter this again, it would be good to figure out exactly how things were set up.

Hmmm….. the “house PA” was a QSC 12 inch powered unit hung in the air on the left, and another identical one hung to the right.  And the outs of his mixer were simply the left one going to the left QSC, and the right one to the right QSC.  Still seems like a stereo-capable path to me.  In fact, I’m not understanding how it could be otherwise (unless the 2 speakers were wired serially)?

[mate stubb]

7 minutes ago, cassdad said:

Hmmm….. the “house PA” was a QSC 12 inch powered unit hung in the air on the left, and another identical one hung to the right.  And the outs of his mixer were simply the left one going to the left QSC, and the right one to the right QSC.  Still seems like a stereo-capable path to me.  In fact, I’m not understanding how it could be otherwise (unless the 2 speakers were wired serially)?

 

Well, if you inspected the PA setup yourself and it was hooked up as described, that changes things. 

 

If the mixer had pan control and left and right outputs, it is stereo. If each output goes directly to its own powered speaker, then the system is stereo. However, the sound guy said it's mono. Something is missing - either the sound guy is wrong, or there is something plugged in between that makes it mono. Graphic EQ for the room or external limiters perhaps?

 

Do you know the model mixer being used?

[cassdad]

25 minutes ago, matted stump said:

 

Well, if you inspected the PA setup yourself and it was hooked up as described, that changes things. 

 

If the mixer had pan control and left and right outputs, it is stereo. If each output goes directly to its own powered speaker, then the system is stereo. However, the sound guy said it's mono. Something is missing - either the sound guy is wrong, or there is something plugged in between that makes it mono. Graphic EQ for the room or external limiters perhaps?

 

Do you know the model mixer being used?

QSC Touchmix 16.  I just looked at the specs….  although it does have one “stereo” input, it does not specifically state that it is a stereo mixer…. but it does have separate left and right outs.  When I looked at it, I thought it could pan true left and right….  but the sound guy says it’s “mono”.  I don’t know.

[Docbop]

The PA could be just using the left and right mixer outs to send a mono out to left side and right side to the power amps or powered speakers, so the PA is running in mono.    

[Delaware Dave]

3 hours ago, Docbop said:

The PA could be just using the left and right mixer outs to send a mono out to left side and right side to the power amps or powered speakers, so the PA is running in mono.    

 

This.  Even if it is a stereo mixer if everything is panned center then he's essentially running mono.  It's possible that he said he is running mono because he doesnt have enough channels to run in stereo.  if he has a 12 channel board that is 12 instrument inputs panned center for mono vs. 6 instrument input stereo pairs before he runs out of channels.  If he had enough open channels he could have panned you left and right and you'd be in stereo while everyone else is in mono.  also, when adjustments need to be made it is easier to make one input channel adjustment to tweak an instrument vs. having to tweak and balance two channels.  left side might be bassier and louder than the right channel for piano so he makes an adjustment then you pull up a synth and the right side might be louder and bassier so be is constantly chasing this all night.  The bottom line is that you reported that the audience said the keys sounded great and the keys were in mono so I wouldnt sweat it.  i cant even remember the last time i ran my rig in stereo and it always sounds great in mono, even the pianos.

[b3plyr]

4 hours ago, cassdad said:

QSC Touchmix 16.  I just looked at the specs….  although it does have one “stereo” input, it does not specifically state that it is a stereo mixer…. but it does have separate left and right outs.  When I looked at it, I thought it could pan true left and right….  but the sound guy says it’s “mono”.  I don’t know.

The Touchmix is definitely a stereo mixer. I use one all the time. And more generally, if a mixer has left and right outputs it is stereo capable. That’s why you have controls for pan - to send which instruments and what levels you want to send to each side, i.e., left and right. So, don’t let him tell you it is not stereo capable. Maybe as someone else mentioned, he is short input channels.

 

[Baldwin Funster]

It was probably easier for him to tell you the PA was mono than to explain he's running it in mono. Plus you handed him 2 XLRs. That would require 2 mono channels using up valuable resources.  If you want stereo hand the guy 2 1/4" cables so he can run you into a stereo line channel. 

[Stokely]

I cannot think of any PA where I've been able to run stereo other than ours, unfortunately.   That includes clubs, resorts and sound company deals.  We aren't a high-end band doing big shows so ymmv.   A fair number of the resorts and clubs pipe the sound around to different speakers so that kinda means mono right there.

I wouldn't give them stereo unless I could also monitor in stereo (I have a couple ways to do this, but both would require in-ears, which isn't always an option).   And if the PA is in mono, I monitor in mono.  I like knowing what the FOH engineer is getting.  

Agreed that pianos suck in mono, it is a pet peeve of mine.

[AnotherScott]

On 12/10/2023 at 11:19 AM, cassdad said:

Background:  I’m a big “got to hear my digital piano in stereo” because I think it sounds incomparably better than in mono.  So… I handed 2 XLRs to the sound guy, “telling him to pan one full left and pan the other full right”.  

One more variable here... with the piano sound panned full left and full right, only a minority of the audience hears stereo anyway. Most people are hearing either mostly the left side, or mostly the right side. I'm not sure there's much benefit to a stereo piano in a FOH situation.

[Stokely]

Problem is that condensing it to mono causes phase/tone issues and even volume changes (in some pianos more than others).  That last bit is why I resolved to always monitor whatever I send to FOH after being told by two engineers that the piano was disappearing out front compared to all my other patches.. To me in my ears it was loud and proud in stereo   

[Docbop]

5 minutes ago, Stokely said:

Problem is that condensing it to mono causes phase/tone issues and even volume changes (in some pianos more than others).  That last bit is why I resolved to always monitor whatever I send to FOH after being told by two engineers that the piano was disappearing out front compared to all my other patches.. To me in my ears it was loud and proud in stereo   

 

Then I'd say just do a narrow spread to avoid cancellations and maybe pan just slight left or right to reflect your position on stage like left of center or right.   So audience hears thing in the position players are on stage.    Hard panning in a large venue really is a bad sound cheating the audience as the previous post said.   No one really wants to hear a band with a 50' wide piano except their mother. 

[CEB]

Holy cow.  Never hard pan stereo keyboard outs in the FOH.  especially many EPs.   When you stereo mic a Leslie you never hard pan the top rotor either.   Maybe 10 and 2 or at most 9 and 3.   It just often doesn’t work unless you are playing a bedroom.    Last 5-10 year more often than not I have had stereo front house.  Stereo tops with bridge mono subs are common.  You still don’t do it. 

[AnotherScott]

Another way to avoid the problem of a piano poorly summing to mono is to just take one output from the piano, the side that doesn't itself sum to mono (so, usually the right side). Of if you take it from the sum-to-mono side (typically left), put a dummy plug in the other side to prevent the summing.

[Baldwin Funster]

Usually your options are stereo keys buried in the mix or mono keys buried in the mix. Mono is less to deal with considering you won't be heard anyways. 

[CEB]

I was almost always heard.   Don’t work with amateurs.  Synth pads in more modern Pop music are difficult.  Especially if a guitarist plays on a tune where one didn’t exist in the original recording.  That stuff disappears live.  Even the crowd can bury you.  Live is not the studio.  But other than than I was usually loud in the front.  

[Baldwin Funster]

17 minutes ago, CEB said:

I was almost always heard.   Don’t work with amateurs.  Synth pads in more modern Pop music are difficult.  Especially if a guitarist plays on a tune where one didn’t exist in the original recording.  That stuff disappears live.  Even the crowd can bury you.  Live is not the studio.  But other than than I was usually loud in the front.  

In my region in No Cal sort of between Sac and the Sierra Nev mountains, all there is is amateurs for miles around. Even the pros are amateurs. 

[cassdad]

3 hours ago, CEB said:

Holy cow.  Never hard pan stereo keyboard outs in the FOH.  especially many EPs.   When you stereo mic a Leslie you never hard pan the top rotor either.   Maybe 10 and 2 or at most 9 and 3.   It just often doesn’t work unless you are playing a bedroom.    Last 5-10 year more often than not I have had stereo front house.  Stereo tops with bridge mono subs are common.  You still don’t do it. 

OK - why not?  What is the reason?

[Reezekeys]

10 hours ago, Stokely said:

And if the PA is in mono, I monitor in mono.  I like knowing what the FOH engineer is getting.  

Agreed that pianos suck in mono, it is a pet peeve of mine.

 

We're different in that I monitor in stereo regardless of the FOH situation - he or she can make it mono, or maybe it has to be mono because the PA is mono (this I rarely encounter), but I honestly don't care to know what it sounds like out front. You're either going to trust the sound person to make it sound good, or in the case of a bad (mono?) sound system or bad sound person, shouldn't at least one of you get to enjoy good sound? And shouldn't that one person be the person actually playing his or her instrument? 🙂

[hrestov]

Yes you have to trust the Foh. But you also have to give him a good sound. And a sound that only sound good in stereo isn’t a good sound. Especially piano patch, we must have a sound that s good also in mono. 

[Stokely]

12 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

 

We're different in that I monitor in stereo regardless of the FOH situation - he or she can make it mono, or maybe it has to be mono because the PA is mono (this I rarely encounter), but I honestly don't care to know what it sounds like out front. You're either going to trust the sound person to make it sound good, or in the case of a bad (mono?) sound system or bad sound person, shouldn't at least one of you get to enjoy good sound? And shouldn't that one person be the person actually playing his or her instrument? 🙂

It's not the quality of the sound that is the problem (though it is A problem), the issue I've had is that some pianos---and other patches if you aren't careful--will drop in volume.  One engineer said they had to boost the piano every time I played it to  hear it.  The problem with that is that he didn't know our songs nor when I'd be using piano.  I wasn't hearing that same drop--to me the piano was pretty much the loudest and clearest patch I was using.

I can certainly try to be more diligent about testing mono at home for every patch, I might have caught this and been able to preemptively just made a mono patch that was boosted.   

To be fair the Nord I have been using doesn't have this drop in volume.  That's one reason I'm using it.  It doesn't sound as good as stereo but what piano does...

Jealous if you actually encounter stereo PAs.  I'm thinking back over the past 12 years I've been in this band, I'm not sure I ever have (and I ask every time).

I do agree overall that out front is the engineer's domain.  They need to do whatever to make the mix work in the venue.  I can't hear it like they do (or at all with IEMs), so I don't "EQ for the room" or frankly ever EQ at all other than a mild high pass.  After yesterday--we played a ballroom for a company xmas party--I resolved to go back in and remove reverb from ALL patches.  That room was horrible with echo, even the people talking in there made for a din.  I don't use a lot, but even a little was too much in there.   We have reverb on our main mixer, and any other engineer will have fx on their PA,  so it can be added there.   While I have a reverb control on the Nord, I would have had to turn it off each time I selected a patch, which wasn't feasible.

[CEB]

13 hours ago, cassdad said:

OK - why not?  What is the reason?

Due to audience perspective.  Because audience members on the right and audience members on the left do not hear FOH stereo.    
 

Mono front house really does make things easier. 

[Reezekeys]

We've heard all the arguments. It's very true that there might be a lot of the audience not in the "sweet spot." Some will get more right, some more left. I will say that this is still better than a stereo piano that sums to mono poorly, where the resulting boxy, phasey sound will now be coming out both sides of the PA on a mono system!

 

Also - it's not like a typical stereo sample of a piano has notes panned across the L - R field. That was the old "Nice Piano" of the Roland JV1080, a mono piano that simply panned notes according to their position on the keyboard; not remotely the same as a stereo-sampled piano. Todays' stereo pianos' samples capture the "space" of a piano. Sure there is some bias to where the notes are, but it's not like half the audience won't be able to hear half the piano notes!

 

My experience seems to be special though I certainly don't consider myself in any kind of big-league playing environments (once in a while I luck out!) - but I rarely encounter mono PA systems on my road gigs. It's something like two places, in over ten years of touring - both small clubs.

 

The very bottom line however, is that I've enjoyed playing the same sampled piano on all my gigs for the last seventeen years. I've tried a few others and they're not as satisfying. I've always brought a stereo system to all my gigs in smaller local venues, so there was never an issue with getting a sound that could make everyone happy. The sound I get on my road gigs with the big PAs in bigger venues is gonna be what it is. It may not be perfect but it's gonna have to do!

[CEB]

I run stereo. Sometimes summed to mono sometimes not.  Often Stereo tops with bridged mono bottoms.  It depends on the contractors.  They do their jobs, I do mine.  I’m stereo because I monitor stereo unless I’m running Shure Mix mode mono on my IEMs and controlling my own mix between the monitor desk and the keyboard submix.  
 

My post was in regards to HARD panning not just direct sounds but twin mics on a Leslie upper rotors.  I also avoid Rhodes ping pong effects even though I like the effect on a Suitcase.   For the most part I’m right with you.  

[sagetunes]

As far as true stereo keyboard in the house---forget about it. Always remember; If you never trust a soundman, you'll never be disappointed by a soundman. Forget about it.

I love a true stereo live sound for myself. Run L/R into 2 powered monitors for yourself. Run a line off headphone jack into your DI into the house. And then forget about it. Enjoy the show. Do it up stereo righteous for yourself--give the sound guy a solid summed/mono signal, and then forget about it. Trust nobody.

[AnotherScott]

2 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

We've heard all the arguments. It's very true that there might be a lot of the audience not in the "sweet spot." Some will get more right, some more left. I will say that this is still better than a stereo piano that sums to mono poorly, where the resulting boxy, phasey sound will now be coming out both sides of the PA on a mono system!

The answer is: Don't use a poorly summed mono piano. 🙂 If none of the piano patches on your board sound good summed to mono, then, as I mentioned earlier, you can use just one side of the stereo signal (not summing the two sides), and you'll get a usable piano sound that has no phase issue.

[Stokely]

Yeah, but if you do that, make sure you test all your other patches    Ask me how I know...I decided to try ye olde "right only" at a gig when mono was sounding like crap but hadn't really checked some of my synth patches.   Some of them were along the lines of bright poly more toward the left, softer pad more toward the right...the end result was not good!  I could see leslies and tremolo and other such effects being a problem as well without some attention, if you are running all of these from the same keyboard.

[MathOfInsects]

I can't ever imagine a situation where I would want them to pan hard L and hard R, even with a nice stereo set up. Maybe if one was one mono board and one was another, so they could mix them how they wanted? I've never come across this as a need, so I'm not sure what the use-case would be. 

[CEB]

I have used hard panning on sound effects.  Example, a zooming car in Rihanna’s Shut Up and Drive.  The car goes from left side to the right.  If the system was mono there was no movement.  Some of my explosions samples are really cool in stereo.