Panpot Stereo Theory / Rotation

[JimJhn]

I was using a stove yesterday and the burner-knob control was a 1/2 turn.

As in mid-left to mid-right, but not a full rotation.

It got me thinking about panpots, which is something I've always wondered about, despite my (quickly increasing!) older age, and being in one studio or another basically every day of my adult life (as a musician, not an engineer).

Saving the psycho-acoustic properties of stereo sound and space, and also the various ways people are inventing plugins to try to pinpoint sonic spatial arrangements with amplitude and phase and whatnot, has anyone seen in the past panpots that are half-turn?

As in (on a clock, left to right) 9:00 - 3:00?

Gain, filter, compression, sends, whatever, you dial in your amounts, and that makes perfect sense to me, but the stereo field is left to right, not behind you (my apologies to au-courant Dolby Atmos).

I've owned rackmount line-mixers for guitars and keyboards lots of times that had small linear slide-pots to do L-R.

It's a very cool idea, but I've found them actually annoying as the travel is so small that they are worse to use than full-turn linear pots for that purpose, and it's too easy to accidentally knock them out of whatever you set them at to begin with when I am trying to play parts and not be an amateur engineer.

But I've been thinking about whether you could have a panpot on a channel that would follow the stereo field left-to-right instead of 1 to 10 or whatever.

The knob would have to be big, otherwise the slightest adjustment would throw too large of a percentage, but I was just sort of wondering if anyone here (who seem to have seen everything!), had seen this before?

Thanks!

 

[Philbo King]

Maybe a horizontally oriented fader would float your boat?

 

[zamproject]

Off topic...and funny cartoon !
In my native language we probably don't say "turn down that stereo !" to ask someone to lower the volume...
But if it was, I probably overcome this injunction, by pressing the mono button

Cheers
Zam

 

[JimJhn]

Well it's the best cartoon I could find in a couple of minutes. Definitely mono.

 

[sodderboy]

With that idea in mind, the travel should be 9:30-2:30 or 10-2, unless your speakers are parallel to each side of your head. Big diff between 120º and 300º.
Think of either side of a pan pot's rotation as "all the way".
It's not really the exact physical spot that is "hard left" that is important, it is that there is no more right side content. And is a track's pot at 4 o'clock not hard-panned, when in the mix? Experienced mixers will pre-pan where they figure things will be, but the actual placement is done by ear and not a position on a knob. Same with EQ, by ear and not number.
To realize a 9-3 pot, mechanically you would have a disc set to the shaft and rig stops, and then deal electronically with the fact that the stop positions are not 0 or 100% of the resistance range.
Then you have LCR pots. . .
Mike

 

[JohnRoberts]

Over the years I have had many discussions with a fellow console designer (now RIP) about such ergonomic considerations. A lot of console design is soft issues (like gain laws, fader tapers, etc) that can have impact on perceived sound quality.

JR

 

[Newmarket]

A horizontal fader would bake sense in being a better analogue of the reality. However, you'd have either super wide channels or tiny faders Then add in the tangle of taper / power law options and you might wish you had left it alone

 

[JimJhn]

Thanks for all of this!

This really was pretty much a theoretical question, and also just curiosity about the huge range of years, eras of consoles the experienced people on this forum have seen.

Mixing is by ear obviously, but I've always wondered whether people had ever seen anything like this in the "days of yore.

When you look at modern consoles, the numbering systems on the dials really reflect the dial's purpose, rather than 1-10 (11 if you are Nigel) and it got me thinking about the idea of stereo panning and how it's not a 340% or so rotation, but a left-right.

Ergonomics are huge to me (and probably everyone else too)!

 

[JohnRoberts]

When you look at modern consoles, the numbering systems on the dials really reflect the dial's purpose, rather than 1-10 (11 if you are Nigel) and it got me thinking about the idea of stereo panning and how it's not a 340% or so rotation, but a left-right.

Ergonomics are huge to me (and probably everyone else too)!

When Peavey developed a vacuum tube comp/limiter (VCL/2) I was involved in the feature set.... I suggested that the volume control be labelled going up to 11 , and that the bass/treble EQ be limited to only +/-6dB adjustment range (do no harm).

JR

 

[kags]

The more you mix on different platforms - either on consoles with their respective pan laws or in DAWs with different pan laws and paradigms of panning, the more you simply rely on your ears and ignore what the knobs, faders, and numbers look like.

I've noticed in setting up mixing/mastering/listening rooms for different people, pop/rock listeners usually prefer the 60 degree equilateral triangle while classical listeners prefer the speakers to be wider, closer to 80 degrees. I think that is because classical listeners are used to live concerts where the orchestra is truly in front of them, spanning the 80 degrees "between the speakers." Pop listeners enjoy a hyper-real sense of panorama with sounds coming from "outside" the speakers.

I've even noticed that when I've mixed on L-C-R consoles, the end result doesn't really sound any different (panorama-wise) than with rotary panpots. It's all perspective.

Regarding EQ
This week I was working with a great bass player who had his own preamp with EQ controls. He played the low E string and adjusted one band of the EQ, then the A string with the next band of EQ, and so on. After he finished, the bass sounded full and even and fit the song quite well. I've never noticed a player setting up the EQ on their system this way, but it seemed to work really well for him. Maybe a bass amp manufacturer has already made a preamp with a four to six-band EQ with note names instead of frequencies?

And, of course, the gain should go to 11!

 

[JimJhn]

I always have obsessed over this when delivering scores.

Stem mixing obviously lets you bring elements down with out losing the music because of dialog, but as far as solo instruments or lines, panning stuff in ways that a concert record would be panned avoids the center and the center-dialog, especially for TV.

Sorry for this non-tech-thread digression on GroupDIY audio, but again the way stuff is built and the way stuff is used is completely intertwined???!!!

Panpots?