Understanding balance/panning in mixer

I needed to separate my L & R outputs on my audio interface to send my GP sounds in mono out of the L output only. I thought I’d take my very last mixer (before the interface) and pan my stereo channels left. I thought it would combine the stereo sound from L&R and send both out on L. It didn’t do that. It just turned the R volume down and only sent the signal from L of the stereo mix. I had to manually snap the wire from the R output to the same L input on my interface to get both R&L coming out of the L output of interface. Is this the intended behavior or a bug? Isn’t panning supposed to send both L&R of the stereo channel to wherever the balance/pan knob is moved to?

in the case of stereo signals routed to stereo gain controls (or mixers) hard panning a balance control just omits the opposite channel from the output, it doesn’t sum the opposte channel over to the panning position.

If you want to sum your L+R to mono, do as you did by routing the pair of signals to a single input point, in this case your audio interface out.

You might want to add a mono gain control just before your output (or a limiter) to attiinuate your volume by -1.5 db since summing a stereo signal adds gain.

Shoudl you need to invert phase upstream of your summing to mono, you can add a mixer node and route the outputs in reverse like this:

image

1 Like

Thanks for the excellent explanation! Yeah I guess now that I think about it, a stereo channel on a hardware mixer works the same way. I just found Melda MStereoProcessor that does what I needed. The pan sends both L&R combined to either side. This way I can setup widgets to do this when I need it. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Here’s one more option for you along those lines using stock items in GP…

You can route the outputs of a simple 4 channel mixer to be any of the stereo pairs (1-2, 3-4) per input channel and the output selection of a channel can be mapped to a widget, like a button.

So you could wire the output of 1/2 as stereo to the destinaton 2 channel input, and you could wire the 3/4 output as mono to just the channel 1 input of the destination (summed mono) and then map a widget button to the channel 1-2 output selection (1-2 or 3-4) which would toggle between your stereo and mono paths.



channel 1-2 now outputs to 3-4

4 Likes

Of course! Excellent idea and explanation! Thanks!

1 Like