Just When We Thought We Had it All Figured Out They Introduce Three-Way Stereo

It sounds like a bad album title at best, bad band name at worst.  Three-way stereo appears to be a real thing, however.  I'm always forward-thinking when it comes to technology AND music so this looks like a homerun for me.

There was a time earlier in my radio career I spent a lot of my hard earned money on headphones.  I wanted good, strong headphones that would last and would make my workday more enjoyable.  After all, the music is why I got into this field in the first place.  Over the years and through the course of many broken headphones I stopped trying.  I settled for the $19.95 headphones at Walmart.  What did I care?  They were just gonna break soon, anyway.

Recently, however, I changed my opinion on the matter.  The first thing to begin my shift in thinking was listening to music through the boys' Beats headphones.  Amazing.  It sounds chiche to say, but it was like hearing the songs again for the first time.  Also, after our new engineer, Casey, installed new processing on my stations I wanted headphones that would produce the most clarity to enjoy the subtle nuances of the new radio processing.  I settled on a pair of hundred-dollar "cans" that are built to withstand a beating.

When trying to explain the amazing sound quality coming out of the Beats headphones my two sons received as Christmas gifts from their grandparents she wasn't budging.  She kept switching back and forth between the kids' Beats and my new huge Sony headphones I got for work saying there was no difference.  The problem?  She was listening to a Rolling Stones song from the 60s.  Of course a song recorded in mono nearly 50 years ago won't do justice to headphones with a rapper's name on them.  After listening to a song recorded since the invention of digital sound she confessed they were amazing.

I bore you with all these details to say I've come across the future of the sound of music.  Now that we have the ability to listen to music as close to the way the artists intended, why not push the envelope and use the technology.  At one point in time the synthesizer was the hottest technology on the planet.  Now we've come across three-way radio.

The concept behind this new method of recording, as opposed to new technology, is to record two versions of the same song, with differences both noticeable and subtle, one going through the right channel and one through the left channel.  Listen to either channel separately and you get two versions of the same song, but listen to both channels at once and you get a dynamic new sound that combines both versions.  Listening to the song below I was able to notice what they're going for.

What about you?  Do you hear the three-way going on?  Even if you hate the song, do you like the concept of this new recording method?