Bass panned across the stereo field cannot be cut cleanly to vinyl and must be summed to mono

Loefah recounts taking ‘Twis Up’ to Jason Goz after ‘panning my bass, which is a real no-no, but I was trying to be clever and throw basslines across the club.’ Jason’s response: ‘We’re going to have to cut this mono you know, bruv.’ Low-frequency stereo information creates vertical motion in the record groove that the cutting lathe (and the playback stylus) cannot track without skipping or losing energy; summing the bass to mono keeps it in the horizontal plane where the groove can hold it. This is why sub-bass in music mastered for vinyl and soundsystems is kept mono, even when higher frequencies are wide — the low end must be centred to reproduce as physical pressure rather than dropping out.

Examples

Loefah ‘felt like such an idiot’ when told to cut mono; the panned bass, meant to ‘throw basslines across the club,’ would not survive the cut. Standard practice: keep sub mono, widen only the highs.

Assessment

Explain why bass content panned wide in the stereo field fails on vinyl and describe the standard fix, contrasting how low and high frequencies are treated in a mastering-for-vinyl mixdown.