(Part one of a series explaining the stereo picture using Blue Cat Audio's Widening Meter Pro plugin)

Tread carefully in the stereo domain. We often take for granted the presence and interoperation of two related channels of audio called "stereo", and why not? Our sound interfaces are monitoring our audio in stereo so our monitors happily present us with a stereo picture by default. To the beginner, stereo seems as if it is an ordained, default mode, just part of the environment. It takes time to move away from this simple understanding of stereo.

There is not one single path to stereo understanding. Some of us who learned by experimentation primarily on the desktop began by manipulating the stereo picture via the pan knobs of our DAW, writing different pans to individual channels. We noticed that depth perception in a mix could be enhanced by panning channels or that there were sometimes unexpected resuts from over-using panning, that we could introduce comical extremes in the stereo picture.

Others who worked in hands-on situations with multiple microphones came at stereo from a different direction. We learned that miking a drum kit, perhaps our first experience with a half-dozen closely-placed mikes, put us in a situation where complicated interrelationships of phase imposed much onto the stereo picture and that we needed to control these relationships at record time (via phase selection and placement) and at mix time via panning.

Either way, we came to regard the stereo picture something to closely manage. We want to balance our channels and we don't want phase inversions between Left and Right channels eating up the information in a mix. If our mixes go to mono, we don't want anything to be lost in the mix, either. At the same time, we often want to use the stereo picture and its dimension of width to impart realism and depth in a mix. How can we accomplish all of these more easily? We surely don't want to hand the mastering engineer a mess when we're done with our mixing - especially if we are mastering our own recordings! How can we anticipate the demands of the stereo domain?

One helpful way to check the stereoness, and phase relationship between stereo channels of your recordings is to run them through a tool that performs Mid-Side Analysis. Put simpy, M-S is a description of a stereo reationship between two tracks. M-S originated as a miking technique, and we will talk about that later. Right now let's understand M-S channels as streams of information about the interrelationship of two stereo tracks. In other words, M-S deals very much with what information appears on both channels of a stereo signal -- a measure of that signal's "stereoness."

For this M-S monitoring, we are going to use a tool made by Blue Cat Audio called Widening Meter Pro. We will fire up this VST plugin and place it on the main stereo bus of our DAW and then run some stereo material in the DAW. Widening Meter Pro will monitor the stereoness of the signal and we'll discuss what these measures mean.

(Watch for part two where we take a close look at stereo material using Widening Meter Pro)