Why so few Stereo Rigs?

[Guitars44me]

I have always figured HIFI mono was the way to go for live sound…

That way everybody gets to hear it as well as possible. Not just the lucky few sitting in the middle of the audience.

Just my cents…

Paul

[Daniel Grenier]

Originally Posted by Josh P.

....
Couple questions on your rig:

How did you come up with the arrangements of pedal order - looper than reverb?
How or for what reason are using the boss AB pedal?
Are you liking the voodoo power supply?

Thanks for the info and for sharing.
Josh"

The electronic order is not what it looks like. Due to patch cords being too short, I had to physically put the looper between the MS-2 and the Reverb. Electrically, it is MS-2 > Reverb > Looper. The AB is for the looper. 'A' selects the location and 'B' either rec/stop/start. It's easier than bending down all the time to select those functions.

Voodoo is ok but kind of oversized for this rig. Except for the Reverb, I could run the whole thing on internal 9v batteries (or 48v phantom for the MS-2).

Last, apologies if I neglected to reply to your other question. Must have missed it.

[ghostnote]

Reason #1 - nobody wants to carry extra stuff. There are people in this sub forum that will sell an amp they love because they found one that weighs 2 pounds less.
Reason #2 - nobody cares but you, the player. Any benefits you hear when setting up your nice stereo rig at home disappear in a typical semi-noisy venue. If it’s a solo recital-type gig, we’ll, I’ll give you that one - in that case it might work. But if you polled people on the way into a venue, I’d bet almost 100% of them would not care if the guitar was stereo or not. I wouldn’t, and as a player I know the difference.

[KevWind]

It's a reasonable question but I agree with most here that unless it is a very quiet crowd, in a realatively small room ,the PA mains are not very far apart, and the audience is seated in a fairly narrow left to right configuration the stereo effect will likely be lost or skewed ...And different rooms are all going to react differently to a true stereo output.

As someone mentioned if you are gigging in a lot of different rooms your mony might be better spent on a High Fidelity mono rig with good reverb and delay etc.

Even with electric guitar rigs there has been an up tic and swing to wet/dry rigs as an alternative to stereo for the same reasons .

[cdkrugjr]

It’s not especially practical.

If you pay attention at a live show, you’ll notice that nearly everything EXCEPT the drums and some special effects are straight up mono. The toms are done “Headphone Extreme Stereo” because it’s a cool effect, but otherwise no.

What you see as “Stereo” is often a “Wet-Dry” rig, with modulation and reverb routed to a single channel, and there are a few players who switch amps during a show, and a few others who’ll have the “official” (i.e. sponsored) amp on-stage while backstage is the Torock or Dumble they’re actually playing through.

Finally, there are a few cases, Kiss springs to mind, who built their entire upstage wall out of fake amps with dozens of fake drivers on display, while their real amps, a single Marshall cab each for at least a while, was safely backstage away from all the hydraulics and pyrotechnics.

Like “It’s a Show” or something.

[Nymuso]

My chorus effects sound great in stereo, and talk about room-filling sound, that’ll do it. But as others have pointed out it’s really not practical or effective with the situations we face in real world gigging. However, when I embark on my solo world tour, I’ll have my crew set it up.

[EZYPIKINS]

Even when running sound for full bands I always ran a mono setup, for FOH.

[Doug Young]

When the setting is right, this stereo setup based on the Sunnaudio preamp works great for me. The cool thing about this specific approach is that it sounds fine where ever you are in the room. That's different from a stereo sound stage of a band, where you'd have to worry that half the audience can't hear the piano or whatever. The thing that's hard to explain unless you either try it, or dig deep into how it works is that people on extreme sides of a room still hear a good guitar sound. Someone sitting dead in front of the left speaker, for example, hears a fairly standard "dual source" pickup+mic sound. And someone sitting dead in front of the right speaker also hears a standard dual source pickup+mic sound. So there's absolutely no issue with this specific approach that half the audience will be missing something the other side hears. Those in the middle will just hear a more spacious sound - while those dead center will get the greatest effect, it sounds fine throughout the room. I've yet to have anyone say "wow, you're in stereo", they just say it's a good guitar sound.

As far as why it's not done more, I think it's a very specific scenario for starters. It works great for solo guitar when playing thru a PA (singer/songerwriter stuff would work great too). It's not so interesting using it as part of a band. So right there, you've knocked out a vast majority of use cases (I still get the "wait, you aren't going to sing? and where's your drummer and bass player?" thing from people who find it baffling that anyone would play solo instrumental guitar :-), so there's that...) Also, some of the other stereo approaches are problematic, there are pickups that pan every other string, or some that can pan the bottom 3 strings one way and the top 3 another, or people use 2 different pickups and send on left and the other right. Those are all going to result in some odd experiences for the listener. A simpler approach that can work is just stereo reverb, tends to be subtle tho, and probably gets lost in most venues.

It's also the case that not every venue is setup for it. I frequently run into mono PAs. Or sometimes the room isn't shaped right, with speakers in weird locations. I always do a quick eval. Will this work well? Does the sound system support it? Does the sound guy stare at me blankly when I ask if he can give me two channels for stereo? Fortunately, my setup falls back to simple mono dual-source easily. So I'm fine either way, it's just that in a good listening room, the sound can be better, if I can use the stereo. And there's no "extra" gear to carry, I just need a pretty small preamp, and if I have to bring a PA, well, nearly all modern mixers are stereo these days and mine is. I'd bring the same rig mono or stereo.

I certainly see other people using stereo in various ways. Michael Manring has a stereo setup for his bass, based on a stereo chorus, with 2 small amps for himself to hear. Again, no one in the audience is likely to detect "stereo", they just hear that expansive Michael Manring sound. I played a gig a few weeks ago with another bassist, John Lester, and I was happy to hear him request a stereo DI from the sound guy - so I just went "me too!". So it's done, but the situation just has to be right.

BTW, here's an example of Michael Manring's stereo setup from a broadcast I produced for them (I imagine that what he hears himself is much cooler than how it comes out to the audience, and that's fine, if you like what you hear, you may play better):



And here's a live example of my Sunnaudio-based setup in a good listening room with a stereo PA:

[Yamaha Man]

i have a stereo rig for home use, so i can get the real sound of my delay pedal, it's great.....i'm using an old Kustom amp and a roland chorus amp, sounds great !!!!

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