Nicolasixxx asked:
Quote:
Could someone explain panning law for me as it pertains to stereo width? i.e. does " 2.5, as in PT, to the levels of 3+, as in Neve and SSL, and beyond to 6" refer to the attenuation as panning moves to center? How does this affect the perceived width of the stereo field?
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Think of it this way: If you take a 1K tone at a given level (say, -10), if you hard-pan it full left, it will drop down 2.5 dB to -12.5. Most of the analog consoles I've used had a 3dB pan law; some use 6dB. And there are some that have constant-pan, so that if you pan something to one way or the other, the dB output does not change at all.
Ideally, Digidesign should give us the ability to control this as a user pref. The problem is, assuming the pan-law factor is imbedded in DAE, this isn't something you could change on-the-fly, probably not even session-to-session. You'd at least have to quit the program and re-start in order to change the pan-law.
And of course, the danger is, if you inherit a session from another user, and they used a different pan-law set-up than you did, the levels could go all over the place. True, .5 dB might not be the end of the world, but it could definitely yield unpredictable results in some cases. Even distortion and clipping, assuming we're talking many dozens of tracks all stacked up together.
I can't see how the pan-law would change stereo width per se. It's just that the overall
level of the stereo signal would be x dB hotter. Since the pan-law affects both channels equally, it wouldn't result in a lopsided stereo image or any weirdness like that, nor would there be any phase problems.
--Marc W.