DES (Digitally Extracted Stereo)

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     Since Steve Massie's passing, I thought I would work up the courage to bring this up. After a dozen or so years of not conversing I re-connected with Steve about 18 months ago when he joined the Top 40 Chat Board. We sent lengthy e-mails back and forth and we wrote about our families, friends, and things we were working on. My "Projects" thread was recently resurrected, too. I asked Steve if he had gotten into DES. He reported that he didn't think he had the energy to get involved into converting monaural music into stereo, in the quality that he had done in the past. He explained that there were (at the time) at least a dozen or so DES 'mixers' that had sent him music files that they had DES'd into stereo and asked him for his opinion. Steve asked me if I would accept some files and give him my opinion. 3 times a week he would send me 2 gigs of .wav files! This went on for a year! I finally had to tell him that I didn't have space on my hard drive for all these files. He was just about done, anyway. 
  I broke it down this way. 30% were junk. 40% were interesting enough to keep, and 30% were FASCINATING! I told him to hear some of these in stereo were really interesting. Like Walt and Mark at Eric Records good. Now there are almost a hundred of these 'mixers' around. I posed this question to Steve, "I know some of these are professionally done, but is this the future? My opinion is that they can be interesting, but do you consider them 'genuine'?" 
  Over at the BSN site there were hundreds of 'Stereo' fans, but we hardly touch on this subject here. Steve gave me a whole bunch of websites where I could download software that would get me into this. I told him, "I've got enough to do, Thanks!!" I wonder how everybody here thinks about DES. -Bill.

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ChicagoBill Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Music Fan Joined: 06 November 2019 Location: Utah Status: Offline Points: 22	Post Options Post Reply Quote ChicagoBill Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: DES (Digitally Extracted Stereo) Posted: 4 hours 26 minutes ago at 9:11pm
	Since Steve Massie's passing, I thought I would work up the courage to bring this up. After a dozen or so years of not conversing I re-connected with Steve about 18 months ago when he joined the Top 40 Chat Board. We sent lengthy e-mails back and forth and we wrote about our families, friends, and things we were working on. My "Projects" thread was recently resurrected, too. I asked Steve if he had gotten into DES. He reported that he didn't think he had the energy to get involved into converting monaural music into stereo, in the quality that he had done in the past. He explained that there were (at the time) at least a dozen or so DES 'mixers' that had sent him music files that they had DES'd into stereo and asked him for his opinion. Steve asked me if I would accept some files and give him my opinion. 3 times a week he would send me 2 gigs of .wav files! This went on for a year! I finally had to tell him that I didn't have space on my hard drive for all these files. He was just about done, anyway. I broke it down this way. 30% were junk. 40% were interesting enough to keep, and 30% were FASCINATING! I told him to hear some of these in stereo were really interesting. Like Walt and Mark at Eric Records good. Now there are almost a hundred of these 'mixers' around. I posed this question to Steve, "I know some of these are professionally done, but is this the future? My opinion is that they can be interesting, but do you consider them 'genuine'?" Over at the BSN site there were hundreds of 'Stereo' fans, but we hardly touch on this subject here. Steve gave me a whole bunch of websites where I could download software that would get me into this. I told him, "I've got enough to do, Thanks!!" I wonder how everybody here thinks about DES. -Bill.

davidclark Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Music Fan Joined: 17 November 2004 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 45	Post Options Post Reply Quote davidclark Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 3 hours 50 minutes ago at 9:47pm
	I too never thought I would have the time/patience/knowhow to create DES mixes, especially when I learned one song could take hours! I have heard a lot of DES leading up to June this year, and IMHO, most of it didn't cut it for me. Either swishy-sounding, too much reverb, not the greatest mixing, changed the sound/feel of the song too much, whatever. There were some, however that did stand out as good to excellent. Moving to June of this year, I found that website with the new models that frankly can separate a song into stems that contain zero or close to zero flaws. Nothing added/removed. They can then be mixed into stereo, and in fact sound excellent. I have made over 600 DES songs since Late June. I've posted a few on the BSN board, but not many. So to me, these DES are comparable to, for example, a "first time stereo in the CD era" for a song, which I always celebrated in the past.
	dc1

PopArchivist Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Music Fan Joined: 30 June 2018 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 54	Post Options Post Reply Quote PopArchivist Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 2 hours 12 minutes ago at 11:25pm
	If done right the DES experience for me has been a good one. Both David Clark and Bill Cahill can make a mono into a stereo without missing a beat. Software is so sophisticated now that if you asked me 20 years ago the answer probably would have been no. For missing 1958-1973 mono 45s its a great way to experience a song in stereo if done right.
	Favorite two expressions to live by on this board: "You can't download vinyl" and "Not everything is available on CD."