Early days of NICAM Stereo

Now there's consumer electronics solution, looking for a problem, if ever there was one !

Techmoan is brilliant. I won't have a word said against him.

Pseudo stereo is still under development. As I previously stated, there are several different pseudo stereo circuits around. Certain circuits could be better (or worse) for certain types of audio than others. I'm a bit dubious of using pseudo stereo with synthesised mono audio such as theme tunes or jingles although opinions differ. Pseudo stereo has been used to enhance mono audio from video games with some degree of success.

But what's the point? Why would you want to? It's a bit like colourising B&W films, or MotionFlow type interpolation on TVs. Just don't see the point.

I mentioned that audio really can be a shadowy underworld of electronics...

When transmitters were NICAM enabled then there was a strong impetus for broadcasters and producers to make programmes with real stereo sound, so few would even bother wanting to dabble with pseudo stereo at the time.

Fast forward to a world where stereo infrastructure is the norm combined with large quantities of older mono programmes being digitised then released to the world in one way or another then it has led to a revival of interest in pseudo stereo. The results vary in quality although the end user is often unaware whether the programme is real stereo, pseudo stereo, or mono on both L and R unless they start analysing sound tracks.

Yes - and even though there were some technical challenges ( VT machines at the time often didn't have enough audio tracks to make quick linear tape edits stereo without audio lay-off boxes) it largely was embraced by mainstream production pretty quickly. (News being a notable exception)

This is in the days before online non-linear editing (in fact off-line non-linear was only just beginning to be developed and not mainstream). High budget shows that went to a multi-track dub were easier to make in stereo. Live shows or as-live similarly. It was low-cost edited shows that were the challenge.



Where is this revival or interest coming from? I have heard nobody discussing it in the TV broadcast sound industry. Most discussions I hear about 'up conversion' in the audio domain are about 2.0 to 5.1 (which is arguably more relevant, and easier to do with a decent stereo image to start with)

Well, motionflow helps negate the current obsession with sticking a film effect on everything and anything regardless of whether it should be there or looks good.

I actually like a very subtle amount of "judder reduction," as my telly calls it. It just takes the jittery edge off, especially on some older films.

Yes - I find it hilarious that manufacturers are fighting production trends - but I've yet to see a frame interpolation system at a consumer price point that is in any way watchable. The artefacts are hilariously bad when they go wrong - and it doesn't remove the temporal aliasing artefacts...

Wagon Wheels don't stop going backwards, they just go backwards more smoothly...

Still, a badly interpolated picture on some shows looks better than the film effect that's been slapped on them in my opinion.

Likewise, I've never heard of a 'revival in interest', although I work in the very mono world of news, where two audio tracks will (mostly) be dual mono to carry different audio (sometimes entirely different feeds) rather than stereo and a lot of the workflow from the field is based around mono.* I seem to remember reading about some 'automatic' 2.0 to 5.1 conversion kit back when HD was first coming in, noggin would have a better idea of how much that might be used now?


Any DVDs I've got of programmes that were originally made in Mono either have a 1.0 audio track or a 2.0 track where the mono audio has been coded to left and right channels with - entirely correctly - no effect applied.

(*If I get a stereo feed from an event to work with I'll do my best to make sure it gets to the listeners in stereo, even if that ends up being defeated along the way. A few months ago a colleague and I went to put a musician on air who was going to play part of a piece during the interview. We carefully rigged a stereo mic setup, made sure it was a stereo link back and warned the studio to select the relevant source in stereo. That message failed to get to the person on the desk who had the channel monoed until the last 30 seconds - all that work for almost nothing!)