[thaumasiotes]

> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places.

But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's very weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.

[heeton]

That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.

[munificent]

Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment.

If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is.

But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.

[im3w1l]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he says the music track can have hard panning, and it's the headphone playback system that should do some compensatory processing so that it sounds as if it was played on two speakers in a room.

Don't ask me how it works but I know gaming headsets try to emulate a surround setup.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Yes, these sorts of compensation features have become common on higher end headphones.

One example:

> The crossfeed feature is great for classic tracks with hard-panned mixes. It takes instruments concentrated on one channel and balances them out, creating a much more natural listening experience — like hearing the track on a full stereo system.

https://us.sennheiser-hearing.com/products/hdb-630

[bongodongobob]

No, they just didn't put much time into stereo because it was new and most listeners didn't have that format. So they'd hard pan things for the novelty effect. This paradigm was over by the early 70s and they gave stereo mixes a more intentional treatment.