Alright, so I understand what you do when you pan a sound… What I don’t understand is how it is handled.
First my assumptions:
Say we have a mono sample. Playing the sample centralized would put 50% of the sound on the right speaker, and 50% on the left, correct? Likewise, panning the sample to 25% to the left would yield 62.5% sound on the left speaker and 37.5% on the right?
How does this process handle a stereo sample? Is one of the fields gradually muted, or are they mixed together before being pushed either left or right? If I have a stereo sample with a square wave in the left channel and a sine in the right, would a hard pan Right play a sinous sound with no squareness? (I hope I make myself clear here.)
When it comes to the stereo width and the stereo expander, I have even less of a clue. It seems to me that I can never separate sounds enough using it; it seems to do nothing except add a slight “phase” effect to the sound when you slide it back and forth.
If I want to do “real” stereo separation I usually make a chain like this:
Track 01 => [effects] => SEND (keep signal) => Gainer (hardpan left)
Send 01 => [more effects] => Gainer (hardpan right)
This yields a result totally different from both the stereo width setting and the stereo expander-plugin, and I really have no clue as to why…
I’m a technical man. I like to know what I’m doing so please help me out here… throw me a bone as Dr. Evil would have said. 
