Issue with old live recorded club mix

[Phat J]

Hey everyone,

This isn't a video related audio question, but hopefully the expertise here could help out with an audio file I have.

It's a bad recording of a dance mix from a club in 1990 that I found online, and it seems to have a bad "stereo focus."

Not sure what the problem is technically called, but when I play it through my home theater with Pro Logic II on, (which upconverts stereo to play through 5.1), this particular recording only plays out of the rear speakers.

When I listen to it in headphones, it sounds really "wide" and "distant" like it's not focused on the "center," if that makes sense.

I've looked at the file in Audition, and I'm sure there's an option in there somewhere to "shift" the sound around, but I don't really know what I'm looking for.

I'm familiar with using Audition for restoring speech recordings, hiss removal, normalization, etc. But I'm not sure what I should be playing around with for this file.

I attached a sample mp3 of the mix to this post.

I realize editing it will further reduce quality, but it's pretty bad to begin with. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

[jagabo]

It's not a true stereo track. A mono recording was recorded on both the left and right channels but one was inverted (presumably to give it that unfocused sound with normal stereo playback). Invert one of them and the audio will play from the front center speaker with Pro Logic decoding.

[Phat J]

Thank you so much. That was it!