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[sludgehammer]

Maybe a stupid question, but how do stereo wideners do what they do?

[Ross Hogarth]

No question is stupid ... not asking is really more ignorant than the ignorance that asking the question is .....
So I will give a bit of a wack here ...
What makes things sound wide is that there actually is some phase incoherency involved.
If you take a pure mono signal, it will come right down the middle.
Now if you take a pure mono signal, mult it , and throw it 180 degrees out of phase, it should disappear.
Now take that source, and play with any amount of phase shift less than 180 degrees and it will start to pan it self one way or another. Most spacializer's are messing with phase in one way or another to give the impression of width and space. The problem of most of these is that they do not fold back into mono well. If you have absolutely no care about a mix or a sounds mono compatibility, than mess around with a stereo width effect to your hearts desire, just know that it will usually dilute the original sound

[sludgehammer]

Thanks.

[Fibes]

Yep, like Ross said... I'm usually not a big fan of the various spatializers/wideners but sometimes you can use the phase issues with them to your advantage. Like most "izers" they rarely excell as advertised but there are myriad other things that they can do for you if you use your imagination and are careful of the side effects.

BTW the PSP audioware one is a pretty cool plug in for the duckets. When it works it works.

[lucey]

real stereo has been sufficient for years

the real trick today is to have a true stereo image that has not been collapsed by poor conversion and other in the box processing.

i'm now converting masters with a Pacific Microsonics Model One and the imaging is all there as compared to the source.  even my HEDD192 pales in comparison.   so you can imagine how all the lesser summing/converter factors can collapse image a little at a time ... resulting in this desire to re-size what is less than the full potential of stereo width.

i say if it's a good mix ... with real stereo ... it's W  I  D  E

[John Ivan]

I would never put an "IEZER" on a whole mix but I have found them useful for groups of stuff sometimes. They are cool little things to have around. There seemed to be a trend in the 90's on big,thick R&B records to over use the hell out of those BBE things. It still gets used to much on weather channel-ish "smooth jazz". Crazy stuff.

[Fibes]

ivan40 wrote on Wed, 26 May 2004 22:50

I would never put an "IZER" on a whole mix .

I wouldn't go there either. Many mastering engineers are spreading out program material lately. I'd be curious how they are doing it. The M/S processing trick is a pretty cool Mastering technique...

[Rob Darling]

To me, the trick with stereo widening is to used delays left and right that when lost, don't affect tone.  Phase shift them to your heart's content, but when they are gone, you still have your center sound happily.  Do the spread on an effect derived from original tone, not on the tone itself.

[gtoledo3]

Not really about wideners, but an interesting phase/polarity trick I discovered....You can use phase to allow only one of your ears to hear a signal...

If you have something panned to 9 o clock, for instance, make a copy of the track, flip polarity, and pan it to 3 o clock. Slowly bring up the flipped track in volume. You will notice that as you raise the volume of the flipped track your right ear will not be able to hear the track coming out of the left speaker, if you are in the classic nearfield monitoring position. The flipped track will probably be best when it is anywhere from a quarter to half as loud as the non-flipped track. If you raise it to full volume, you get the classic out of phase thing happening- which is not what you are aiming for necessarily.

I use this technique sometimes if I want to make something sound REALLY hard panned. I got the idea from reading the white paper about some obscure dolby idea that theoretically yeilds surround sound from two speakers.... well, it doesn't do that too well, but it does allow for some other interesting effects.