Time and time again, I see students run into trouble because of assumptions they make around the word “stereo.” I’m not trying to take you down a notch by making you feel like you don’t understand something that you thought you did, but signal flow legitimately trips a lot of people up, so I want to challenge you by thinking about this example. Call this a mono signal, like a vocal, and you’re going to feed this through your DAW where it’s going to come out two speakers. Is this twice as loud?
Well, yeah. And what happens when you pan it to one side? Does this side get louder?
Well, that depends on something called the pan law. Not all DAWs and not all consoles handle this the same way. Typically, we see something called negative 3 dB compensation, and that means as the signals pan from left to right, it’s adjusted so that the overall volume is even all the time.
In other words, as the signal is brought into the center, it’s attenuated by 3 dB because it’s twice as loud. But there’s lots of stuff like this, and it’s important. For example, just because you hear it out of the left and right doesn’t make it stereo, and this isn’t a stereo cable.
You can ask me about this stuff in a Beat Kitchen class. Follow us, like this post, and maybe we’ll see you there.
