Waking Up Old Mono Recordings

I have a lot of mono recordings. Early jazz, a handful of fifties blues sides, some early hard rock records from before stereo was a thing. They sound great as-is, cause that's how they were made back then, but through headphones they can feel claustrophobic - everything pinned dead center.

So tonight I added a new DSP called "Stereoize". It takes a mono signal and gently opens it into a stereo image without mangling the tonal balance. There are a lot of ways to do this badly: some tools just duplicate the signal with a phase trick that collapses back to mono the moment you sum for loudness, others smear transients so badly that the recording sounds underwater. I wanted something that felt natural - more like sitting in a good room than applying a plugin.

It's tuned conservatively by default. You can hear the space open up without losing the center image, and it works cleanly with the rest of the Output Tools chain, so you can shape it even further. I've been listening to a Sonny Rollins record from 1956 on repeat for the last hour with this on and it feels alright. Try pairing it with the "M/S Decoder" or "Width" knob.