Extremely Right and Left panning

Question

Is it possible to achieve stereo sound totally without the "Center". Only extremely Right and Left pan (e.g. Choirs).

If yes, please tell me how? I'm using Ozone iZotope plug-in.

Answer 1

Not practically. In stereo sound, the phantom center is the 'illusion'. Exactly center is whatever is exactly identical between the two channels. One can generalize and say that the width of the image is proportional to how 'different' the two sounds are.

But it actually turns out this is a mathematical property of sound. Ignoring that there are a few other subtle queues humans pick up on that determine direction, mainly when you are talking about a stereo pan, you are talking about a phase difference.

So if the center is when the left and right channels are completely in phase, then completely eliminating the center would be when the left and right are 100% out of phase.

And you can try that out: take some mono signal and invert the phase of one side and it sounds basically about as "wide" as you'll get. But there's a problem which is that since sound sums additively, if you sum the two channels they subtract and disappear completely. There are other problems but that is the most drastic and what happens if you try to completely eliminate the center.

Doing any kind of stereo pan effect is just a balance between how wide you want it to sound and how much crap it becomes when it (inevitably) becomes much narrower on everyone's laptops (or can be summed to mono completely for radio).

Ozone has M/S mode for basically everything now. A pretty obvious choice is to raise a high shelf on the sides.

Answer 2

One can achieve such an effect by adding a plug-in to a channel that can phase-invert either the left or right stereo channel. This is a great way to make a pad fill up an entire audio space.