Topic: Phasing and wind.

[Gutbucket]

...My point basically is that if you had a single rigidly mounted speaker and a rigidly mounted mono mic, you'd still hear the swirly sound effect at distance with big gusty winds.

Humm wonder how they came up with the Lesley speaker

Yeah! Do the opposite and get some super-cool swirlyness by not rigidly mounting the speaker but spinning it around on purpose. 

Back in my Beetle-infused 4-track cassette days I once set up 4 mics and the batt powered cassette recorder on one of those old playground push merry-go-rounds with the mics along the edge, one at each quadrant, recorder at the center, everything taped down good to stay put.  We'd spin the thing and our four piece band would play, one of us on each side, for a crazy psychedelic effect. 

[KLowe]

The wideness does not get rid of wind noise... only reduces phasing issues caused by it.

In fact it may make it worse, because instead of everything being cluttered and mixed together at the center, frequencies get separated out over the soundstage, so you can hear each instrument more clearly.... which has the effect of hearing the wind more clearly. Some of this can be reduced with a low end cut, but I tend to just leave it because a low end cut will effect some quality in the bass... and I just look at it as something that comes with the experience..... just like crowd noise. If the music is loud enough, and your in a good spot, it should overpower the wind anyway. Or you could spend a few hundred on some good wind jammers, or choose sub-card/omnis when it's really windy.

FWIW CDspindoctor is an accessory program for Toast, available for the mac. Anybody know of similar features or plug-ins for other software?

so.  would panning "wide" with a normal pan function do the same thing?

[SparkE!]

Here' my attempt at boiling it down into the bare essentials:

Sound travels in air at some well-defined velocity (which is constant throughout the listening space) that depends on atmospheric pressure and temperature.  When you add wind to the situtation, sound still travels at the same velocity relative to the air, but the wind is moving the air so the actual velocity that the sound travels is that of speed of sound plus the local speed of the wind (which probably is not constant throughout the listening space).  If sound travels by two paths, one of which is assisted by the wind and the other of which is not as assisted by the wind, and they recombine elsewhere with one of them arriving a half wavelength sooner, then they will recombine destructively and the combined volume will be reduced.  When the wind changes and doesn't give the wind assisted path that extra 1/2 wavelength of extra distance traveled, then sound arriving through those two paths recombines constructively and the combined volume will be increased.

Boiled down even further:  Wind simply blows the air around while it carries sound on its way to your ears. The resulting sound that you hear gets to your ears by different paths each time the wind changes.

Boiled down even further: Wind blows the sound around and makes it sound all swirly.

[danlynch]

FWIW CDspindoctor is an accessory program for Toast, available for the mac. Anybody know of similar features or plug-ins for other software?

Soundforge has an application called "pan/expand".

[Gutbucket]

Excellent boil, Spark.

[spyder9]

I noticed this in my mountain jam recordings too. I got rid of most of it by applying a filter called wideness, in CDSpindoctor. The wideness does just what it says. Widens the soundstage of the recording. This is presumably done by some kind of manipulation of phase over different frequencies, based on the same science as noise canceling headphones. It definitely widened the soundstage, but also had the beneficial effect of reducing the phasing issues caused by the wind. It does sound better with headphones than on a stereo though.

Under Adobe Audtion 3.0, its under:

Effects > Filter and EQ > FFT Filter Process > Mastering Heavy and Wide

+T on this find.  Made a big difference.  Thanks!   

[mblindsey]

While I've been unsuccessful in using it for wind blown recordings with phase issues, there is a very cool stereo plugin called 'JS:StereoField' in the uber-cheap DAW, Reaper (http://www.reaper.fm/).  The DAW and the "rotate stereo this-way, that-way" plugin are very cool.  There are a ton of other handy plugins too.  It's hard to beat for $50.  I use it for most of my *.wav operations these days....

--Michael