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- Well? -On a recording board I frequent, it’s being discussed if music that is mixed in stereo should maintain well when summed to mono. It’s always been recording industry practice in the past, but making radios stereo has become electronics industry practice now. Most of the music market is in FM, and most consumer audio players are stereo now. Are there still any mono-only FM stations around?
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- Also, it was suggested that good mono mixing was necessary because when a radio signal’s reception is poor, it flattens to mono. My guess is that there’s also significant fallout in the radio signal overall as well…does anybody know how much distortion it takes to prevent a radio signal from being received in stereo, and if this feature degrades first, or evenly with the entire signal?
From what I’ve read, there are still a handful of U.S. mono FM stations. The most common reason is that a mono-only signal will travel a little farther, so for stations that are licenced to a community that is fairly distant from a major population center, they will operate in mono to get their signal strength up enough to get the increased listeners.
I’m a little weak in the technical area, but a receiver decides if a station is in mono or stereo based on whether it is receiving a special “pilot signal” included in the station’s transmission. If the reception is too weak to pick up the pilot signal, or there is distortion due to multi-path signals, etc., the radio automatically switches to mono. A somewhat technical review is located at FM Stereo Transmission.