Dumbass question - what's meant by 'mono' mixing?

[Chrisulrich]

Dear Anyone.

As far as my limited understanding goes - anything that comes out of 2 speakers is stereo, left and right. So when
YouTube advises me to check my mix in mono, do they mean the output of just one speaker? If I've used panning to get sounds out of the way of eachother, I wouldn't be able to hear them if the mix was only coming out of one speaker, would I? And if I remixed it so it sounded good coming out of one speaker, and panned all the sounds so they were all coming out of one speaker, surely it would sound awful if I brought the other speaker back - you'd have a faint electrical hiss on one side and a loud track coming out of the other side.

I know the above must count as one of the dumber questions on the forum but keep coming up against this on YouTube"

 

[RFR]

Switching to mono when you have two speakers simply collapses the stereo image and it comes out of the center . Nothing is panned anymore.

It can be very useful for mixing. Mixing like this you can carve out space via eq rather than location in the audio space.
Nothing is fighting something else.

 

[VomitHatSteve]

Stereo technically means something more like "existing in 3 dimensional space". Two speakers is the usual interpretation, but that's really just the minimum. 5.1 surround sound is also a form of "stereo"

But what the recommendation to listen in mono really means is to send a mono signal to both left and right channels and listen that way. Your DAW likely has a mono toggle option. If not, you can open the file in Audacity and click the "split stereo to mono" option on the track

A big part of what this step is actually for is checking for phase issues between your L and R channels.

 

[rob aylestone]

Think of it as an old radio, or a tv, or even some laptops. If you take a track, and duplicate it, try panning one fully left and the other full right. Then press the ‘phase’ or polarity reverse button and it often sounds even better. If you do that when you are listening in mono, that channel totally vanishes.rarely a problem for stereo listeners, but somebody listening on a radio would lose tracks. Imagine if it was the vocal. Vocal? What vocal?