With a stereo-sound, does a panoration simply fade one of the channels and enhance the other, or does it mix them together and push them towards one of the speakers?
Also, how does a stereo separation work? It won’t work with some effect/vsti-setups: at 100% separation, all sound is muted. (might happen when a heavily separated sound passes through a mono-effect… but I’m not sure)
How does pan and stereo separation combine? Well or not so well?
In some professionally mixed songs, I hear a sound being so separated it almost sounds like it’s coming from behind. With Renoise, there seems to always remain a portion of the sound in the “middle” of my head (when listening with headphones)
I’ve wondered this too actually, because the Waves plug-ins have some stereo controls that are more realistic and technically more correct than the usual L-R slider you might have that just plays the signal louder or softer in one of the channels. I’m not sure how it works though.
I tend never to use stereo separation when mixing down songs actually, as I’m against all those artificial effects. Usually those kind of effects are done with careful use of high quality reverb, and yes, I guess stereo separation of some sort as well.
Panning in most applications is just fading out one channel, however more and more programs are introducing a function that boosts one channel while cutting the other so as to maintain the total volume of whatever it is you are panning.
The stereo separation you speak of is just putting the channels slightly out of phase with each other, and the mute at 100% separation would be when it gets to 180 degrees out of phase, which causes total cancellation when passed through a mono stage (as you suspected).
a stereo sound is actually having two tracks, that we call channels, no?
but it is 2 independant waves one of which plays in the left, and the other in the right.
so when you hear a sound that goes from left to right, it fades out in the left and fades in in the right. and the feeling is, that it goes from left to right.
so what difference does it make if panning just fades one channel out and fades in the other, or puts them together and changes their place in audio space. while it is just easy to check, by taking a stereo sound from left to right play with panning and see what happens.
am i confusing matters…
I’m not sure if I understand correctly…
Are you wondering what the difference is between panning and stereo seperation?
Panning makes it sound like it’s louder in the left or the right channel. This may work by just lowering the volume of one channel, or boosting one and lowering the other at the same time.
Stereo seperation makes the sound feel as if it is coming from two seperate sources (left and right) instead of from the middle (in between the speakers), but doesn’t have anything to do with the volume in either left or right channel.
