Stereo is Overrated

I'm not a recording engineer with a bag of tricks but I do have one now. Has anyone else noticed that when playing a track panned hard to one side and then put 100% wet mono high cut reverb of that track panned hard to the other side, it sounds awesome?

Uhh, that’s stereo. You only need one speaker for mono. Two channel mono doesn’t work as well because of room interaction. You don’t get the solid point source.

squarewave said:

I'm not a recording engineer with a bag of tricks but I do have one now. Has anyone else noticed that when playing a track panned hard to one side and then put 100% wet mono high cut reverb of that track panned hard to the other side, it sounds awesome?

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It's an old trick. Some mixers had the possibility of putting the echo sends after pan-pot but L-R crossed. The first Harrison desk had a customizable routing grid in each channel that could do that.
It was much complication so the idea did not catch up, particularly with the event of affordable digital reverb units, which made simply using the basic facilities of any mixer to work.
With the almost unlimited number of channels and reverb instances in a DAW, it's quite easy to do. I guess that's what you do...

Gold said:

Two channel mono doesn’t work as well because of room interaction. You don’t get the solid point source.

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By two channel mono you mean simply the same track on both channels? I thought that was pretty common to just pan something in the middle. I suppose it depends on the instrument. If it's just drums or something that doesn't have sustained notes, it probably doesn't matter so much. With sustained notes like voice, guitar or synth I could see how room interactions could cause comb filtering.

Ampeg used to make an amp that employed two cabinets,  one the dry guitar and the other reverb only.  Sounded great.

VH1 is a classic album with the left / right,  wet / dry guitar recording.

squarewave said:

By two channel mono you mean simply the same track on both channels?

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Yes. True mono is with one speaker. Anything else isn’t true mono.

What you are doing is most definitely stereo. Having uncorrelated left and right channels is the definition of stereo.

Two channel stereo is a compromise. Most console Pan law is 4.5 dB down to make a panned mono source sound even over the stereo field. Electronically this should be 6dB for a fully correlated sum. The reason 4.5dB works better is the acoustic power sum in an average room is not perfect. 4.5 dB is a fudge.

Gold said:

Yes. True mono is with one speaker. Anything else isn’t true mono.

What you are doing is most definitely stereo. Having uncorrelated left and right channels is the definition of stereo.

Two channel stereo is a compromise. Most console Pan law is 4.5 dB down to make a panned mono source sound even over the stereo field. Electronically this should be 6dB for a fully correlated sum. The reason 4.5dB works better is the acoustic power sum in an average room is not perfect. 4.5 dB is a fudge.

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In my experience typical console pan laws use -3dB at center, based on -3db being 1/2 power.

JR 

JohnRoberts said:

In my experience typical console pan laws use -3dB at center, based on -3db being 1/2 power.

JR

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Most british mixers are based on -4.5. It makes much sense for music recording/mixing, because the acoustic pressure of studio monitors combine more than quadratically. -3dB would be OK for totally uncorrelated signals, which is obviously not the case.
I read a survey that had measures of various studios, that showed the combination factor to be about -1/-1.5 dB for two speakers driven each at -6. That's consistent with my findings when I did monitor set-up in the 80's.
Pan law at -3 results in a level increase in center position.
Even large concert sound systems combine more efficiently than the assumed 3dB loss.

Another vote for 4.5dB now being the accepted fudge.

-3dB at centre is old school though

squarewave said:

I'm not a recording engineer with a bag of tricks but I do have one now. Has anyone else noticed that when playing a track panned hard to one side and then put 100% wet mono high cut reverb of that track panned hard to the other side, it sounds awesome?

Click to expand...

I do that all the time in mixing, I guess it's a pretty common thing to do.
Dry to hard panned to one side and reverb to the other, or Delay, Slapback, you name it. Probably use that at some point with some instrument in all my mixes