Topic: Mono SBD presentation etiquette question

[billydee]

Since we're on the topic of "mono" recordings I have a somewhat related and hopefully not too far off topic (or dumb) question for the experts here.

So I recently (and for the third time in the last year) made a three-channel live recording using a set of mics in the room and a single mono sbd feed via XLR connection on the back of a powered speaker.

I use Audacity for post processing and this time instead of copying the left channel to the right channel (or vice versa) for the soundboard feed and then doing my matrix mixing with the L/R aud channels, I made that mono soundboard feed into a one channel file, using Audacity. (I hope this makes sense so far).

My question then is, will having a "pure" mono mixed with the L/R aud channels sound any different then using L/R mono channels instead like I'd done previously?

[Gutbucket]

No difference between a monophonic signal used as one channel, panned to the center when routed to a stereo output bus, and the same signal copied to two separate channels (assuming identical level, EQ, etc. on both channels), routed directly to the left and right stereo output bus.

Just different working methods of achieving the same thing.  If it doesn't sound identical something else is going on.

[billydee]

No difference between a monophonic signal used as one channel, panned to the center when routed to a stereo output bus, and the same signal copied to two separate channels (assuming identical level, EQ, etc. on both channels), routed directly to the left and right stereo output bus.
Just different working methods of achieving the same thing.  If it doesn't sound identical something else is going on.

That's pretty much what I thought, thanks for the confirmation!

[capnhook]

Yep, make it mono in Audacity and mix it with your stereo mics.

Matrix GOLD.....

[morst]

I'd say it depends on where and in what form you are posting it-
If posting FLACs, I'd say post it as a single-channel file-set. The original is a single channel WAV, and doubling the channel count with identical information needlessly increases the size of the file-set.

Actually FLAC does not use space in that way. 

If the channels are identical, when compressing to flac, flac is smart enough to know it only needs the data from one channel.  So an identical two channel recording compresses to roughly half the size of a recording with two independent channels. 

You can try it by compressing the one channel mono wav and the same wav as two mono channels.  For all intents and purposes the flac compressed files will be the same size either way. 

If that's the consideration there is nothing to influence you one way or the other regarding flac formatting or circulating as such.

EXCELLENT INFO!

Abnormally small flac fileset sizes is a dead giveaway for an un-advertised mono recording, fwiw.

A brilliant tip!

I don't recall where, but I have had compatibility problems when I have tried using mono FLAC files, so I would suggest duplicating the channel into left & right before encoding  to FLAC.
My issue could have been attempting to upload a mono file to the live music archive... I know I have had it come up and decided that dual-mono was the easiest solution.