It has to do with phase and it has it's origins in record players. Single phase mono aural cables where just white, when you added a second phase to make phonographs stereo it was RCA & Westrex engineers color coded either black/red or white (L) was considered the pure mono phase (+) and red/black were the negative phase (-) and color coding from electrical wiring was adopted although phase has nothing to do with voltage in this particular application since each side had coils that produced a sinusoidal voltage. Both wires carry a modulated electrical current, electrons are negative potential charges, that's why hot wires are actually negative and ground or 0 is considered a positive 0. So the same way electrical circuits were diagrammed audio circuits were diagrammed W(0) R/Bk(-1) Y(-1(2)) Bl(-1(3)) ... G(0/0)

I don't know if it's age or if recently my tolerance for humor that punches down in a passive aggressive manner has gone from tolerant to intolerant. Whatever, horses and water.

cheers.

 

Spoiler: Well, at least you can split a stereo track

 

Nobody mentioned certain compressors that can either process the stereo channel as fundimentally one channel and compress the entire signal in lump form or compress the left and the right independantly.

 

yes but if both cables had the same color then you might end up beeing female instead of male.

but whatever, wrong colors is still better than "too short" or "forgot to order one"

 

i wonder whos idea that was to sum two different channel´s sidechain input. what were they thinking in the 1970s?

 

the interesting thing is that most people dont know whether to use red as left or right because you never really know wher left and right is anyway, because sometimes you connect things from there forefront and sometimes from their back.

i was recording for years with the audiointerface connected crossed to the mixer and i fixed it by changing the speaker connections. didnt use panning much on the analog mixing desk anyway.

best cables are like multicores, which have numbers 1-10 printed on them. i want that for stereeo cables, too.

 

In addition to what @No Avenger wrote:
It goes wrong when you route these mono channels to a stereo bus or master - without panning them to Left & Right. Because then they just get summed, and any stereo information get's lost.

 

Simple answer: things go wrong beyond 180 degrees.