User:Michaelmcgennan

There is one very easy way to hear much bigger sound on digital music that you have in very narrow stereo format, or indeed, as mono.

How to [tisdu].

Do you have a music compact disc with a really clean crisp sound that just hangs between your speakers - that is, great mono? But still great MONO. Try this.

Extract a sample track to your hard disk, open it with a sound program that lets you edit tracks. Insert five one hundredths of a second (5/100 = 0.05) of SILENCE [nada sound, nothing, zero amplitude] at the very start of the right channel only.

THE RIGHT CHANNEL ONLY

You will be splitting the delivery of the signals to paired ‘left’ and ‘right’ speakers by this minuscule amount.

However, minuscule as the amount is, this silence introduced to the right channel gives the left channel more apparent volume.

The 'solution' is to decrease the amplitude (volume) in the left channel to 80% of the right before burning the disc.

Then, when played back on your stereo, the apparent volume edge in the left channel is compensated by the actual volume edge in the right channel, and to the ear, they are equal.

Then...

Listen to the result, preferably by headphones, or even more conclusively, burnt to a disc for listening with your normal stereo player set-up. Let your ears be the judge.

If your ears say "yes"...

Extract an entire disc as one unbroken 'track' and repeat the procedure as described above.

Then, however you normally set track cues for identifying individual songs prior to burning a disc, the [tisdu] effect will be present in EACH song because it was universally applied to ALL songs across the disc's length.

Now, after all of the above, a proviso or two.

[tisdu] is not so much a fake stereo as a speakers-wide, space-between-them-filling, 'thick' mono.

On headphones you CAN clearly hear different sounds from different channels (just like stereo), but this is an 'accidental' effect of the slight delay of the same sound reaching different speakers.

Headphones off, in your loungeroom, on your crank-it-up stereo, [tisdu] is more about recreating big concert hall ambience than it is about assigning particular instruments to different tracks and thus specific speakers as a producer in the studio would do.

Living in Australia, and unable to resist silly plays on words, [tisdu] is short for -

Teased into 'stereo' Down Under.

Sorry 'bout that. It sounds better than the name it answers to!

Second proviso: [tisdu] is not a cleaning-up process. If I am capable of fixing drop-outs, removing clicks or otherwise banishing digital flaws, then during the [tisdu] process I will do my best to get rid of them.

Well-known cuts in tape sources, drop-outs, patched together versions, things known all too well to boot collectors, [tisdu] simply faithfully replicates.

Programs that will [tisdu] -

Amadeus 11 and Amadeus Pro in Macintosh Audacity (versions available for all platforms, downloadable free, from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

[tisdu] Tips:

In the sincere hope that traders are having a little play with applying [tisdu] to some of your sets, so we can all build up the database of [tisdu] sets around, I'd like to offer up a couple of observations and tips to help 'improve' your results.

1) Pump Up the Volume:

I find [tisdu] works 'best' with some grunt in the signal, so if the originating source is soft, it doesn't hurt to increase the amplitude (that is, the 'volume' of the signal in both channels - but make sure you keep it well short of peaking too high in the louder bits to avoid making new click sounds) before [tisdu]ing.

2) How to un[tisdu] - in the absence of an original source of the music.

If you don't have the original, and you don't want to wait for a trade to unfold to get it, the following procedure is a quick and dirty rendering for an as-near-as-damn-but-not-quite 'exact' sample of what the music sounded like pre[tisdu].

Extract the [tisdu] disc's tracks to your hard drive and insert 5/100ths of a second silence at the start of the channel you didn't shunt forward to make the [tisdu] treatment – normally, the left channel.

Amplify the left channel rendered 80% lower during [tisdu]-making by 130% to rebalance volume output per channel.

If you 'zoom right in on the graphical representation of the two channel's audio signals, they should now mirror each other as they did pre-[tisdu].

You can also create a temporarily un[tisdu]'d disc for the following use -

3) Editing a Flawed [tisdu] Set.

If you want to remove sound flaws from a [tisdu] set, I have found they edit more 'cleanly' in a temporary non-[tisdu] state, because sound flaws are usually consistent across both channels originally, not 5/100ths of a second apart across both channels as they are after [tisdu].

Extract the music to your hard drive as stereo, realign the tracks as described above to un[tisdu], do your edits on the now aligned left and right channels, and then, re[tisdu].