300 Hz and below in MONO? (for vinyl)

[stevedood]

what's the easiest method to get 300 Hz and below of a stereo WAV file to be in MONO (panned center)? I'm assisting an artist with prepping files for vinyl.

I have Cubase & Wavelab at my disposal.

Within Cubase, I am guessing I would high pass filter the stereo track above 300 Hz and then create a mono duplicate which gets the low pass filter below 300 Hz, even summing between the two and hope the EQ doesn't mess up the phase.
Would this work ok?
Any other ideas?

thanks,

steve

[ashcat_lt]

Easiest? How's about Basslane? Freeware VST does exactly what you want without all the bussing, possible latency induced phase shifts, etc.

There are others out there, google Bass Management and you'll find a few. Most are designed for multi-channel surround audio, but should work.

[stevedood]

That's awesome. Thank you so much for the (just in time) info!
The Tapeop Message Board continues to prove itself so useful time and time again

~steve

[MoreSpaceEcho]

fwiw i've mastered a bunch of things that were destined for vinyl and i've never mono'd 300 and below and they came out just fine. i'm just saying i don't at all think this is something you HAVE to do. i could be wrong. hopefully steve berson will chime in and drop some science.

[farview]

I would assume that the guy manning the lathe would be the one to mono out the low end. I could be wrong.

[goose]

Leave the low end to your cutting engineer. It is a myth that it's standard practice to mono the low end on vinyl. It's done, but not always.

I've never monoed my bass before sending it off to be cut to lacquers and the cutting guys never complained.

I should have a lathe in the next several months or so and my opinion may change after that.

[Professor]

For that matter, 300Hz is hardly just the low-end, that's just above middle C. That's 4 octaves out of ten that we can hear. Nothing wrong with choosing that as the starting point for your roll off, but you may want to keep that at a more shallow crossover point.
The thing to be more concerned with is the high frequencies. I had a group take a project to URP for a small vinyl package, and the cutter just obliterated the high-end with something like an 18dB/octave roll off from 6kHz. And I had done a lot of work to smooth the top end, control 'S' sounds and limit stuff above 12k. I'm not entirely sure the company even listened before the pressing.

-Jeremy