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Reproducing vinyl in mono.

Chris

pfm Member
I use vinyl only and have recently lost all hearing in my right ear and I am just daydreaming about a Mono A&R P77 in my Ittok. If you only have one ear, is there any point in having a stereo cartridge ?
What can be done . How do mono cartridges differ from a stereo cartridge? Is it just the wiring inside the cartridge body? I can simulate mono by joining both right and left signal input but is that the same as having a mono cartridge.
Or is it just the LP itself that defines mono or stereo and a mono cartridge must read a mono LP . Can I simulate mono from a stereo record ? Or is it different somehow? Does anyone prefer mono to stereo as in black and white versus colour in photography?
It would be wonderful to have a mono stylus assembly and a stereo stylus assembly for the same body but would it still depend on the record itself ?

just wondering........
 
Sorry to hear of your hearing loss, though give yourself some time to adapt before changing anything. I say this as one of my friends who I’ve known for a very long time is an audiophile who totally lost hearing in one ear as a child (nerve infection or something like that). He very definitely gets a sense of stereo image, depth, scale etc, he just sits off axis to the system but can tell you accurately how things are panned etc. The human brain is a pretty remarkable thing, it does adjust to sense damage by increasing perception, but it takes time. He obviously needs a mono feed on headphones, but no way would he want a mono system as he still very much gets the room filling aspects.
 
There may be another reason to stick with stereo, which I encountered when making stereo photographs using grainy 135 film: as soon as you go cross-eyed to overlap the stereo pair of images, not only does a 3D view of the subject emerge, but the apparent resolution of texture and detail seems to jump higher, and the grain seems to get finer. The brain is very good at automatically summing data from each eye, failing over to the other eye when the dominant eye experiences any signal failure. At least, that's a theory, but the important point is that the grain seems diminished, opening up detail and texture. Two images seem to give more data than one when losses are not subliminal.

I often wonder if there is a similar effect with stereo sound, because switching to stereo sometimes seems to do more than just spread the sound across the stage - it can seem to make it richer and fuller. I suspect two channels deliver more information than one channel when there is liminal random loss in the signal chain. I would stick with stereo and twist my melon to hear both channels in the good ear.
 
True mono records and cartridges are indeed different from stereo ones in various ways. But I'd rather not get into the pointless subjective arguments of stereo vs mono.

In your shoes, I'd stick with stereo. I think we hear not only with our ears but also through vibrations felt by our body.
 
By weird coincedence, I was reading only yesterday of a box of electronics that takes stereo signal from a TT and converts it to mono. What I do not know is who makes such a thing, price etc..If you can find one and it isn't vastly expensive, this might be a better way to experiment as it is just a drop-in box.

ed. - just googled "convert stereo to mono" - LOADS of hits, maybe at least some may be useful.
 
If you have seperated pre - power amps or an amp that has a tape loop then a few resistors can give you mono from stereo.

However as per what Tony says: Each ear can also detect vibration *though* the head. And each ear hears sound from *both* speakers via the air as well. The difference in speaker positions affecting what that sounds like.

So don't assume that stereo has no audible effect if you can only hear in one ear.
 
Have you checked out some of todays modern digital hearing aids. I have heard they are very good.
 
Have you checked out some of todays modern digital hearing aids. I have heard they are very good.

Won’t that make everything sound like cd?

Joking apart many, many moons ago I had a school music teacher who wore hearing aids. When he retired his treat to himself was a high end Hifi. He enjoyed his music no less than the next person.
 
Unfortunately the only hearing “aid” that could help me would be a head transplant. The missus was right all along. The damage has nothing to do with my ear, outer or inner, as such. It’s further inside - the audio nerve is buggered through friction between a foreign body (Schwannoma), my skull bone and the nerve itself.
 
The damage has nothing to do with my ear, outer or inner, as such. It’s further inside - the audio nerve is buggered through friction between a foreign body (Schwannoma), my skull bone and the nerve itself.

That is very similar to what my friend has. Just get used to sitting off access or sideways on to the speakers, and allow your body/mind to gradually adapt to the sensory loss. This will take a long time but your remaining good ear will relearn its craft to at least some degree and I am sure you will still get a lot of benefit from a room-filling stereo sound.
 
Sorry to hear about your loss of hearing.
Stick with stereo. I have a friend with bad hearing on one ear. He enjoys stereo sound as much as me.
 
Thanks to all for the good wishes. I will stick with stereo until I get a good offer for a head transplant. My problem is how to improve on perfection
 
Summing some stereo recordings will create phase problems - often exhibited as a loss of lower frequencies.

In theory stereo recordings should be mixed to be mono compatible but my suspicion is this has become less of a concern with newer recordings.

I think you're right to stick to two speakers.
 
If I sum both channels on my phones, and listen to stereo recordings on vinyl, might the same phase thing happen ?
 


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