Speaker Panning vs Headphone Panning

[Dave]

It’d be nice if we could set stereo auxes to be in a “headphone panning” mode for IEMs. Like, panning something all the way to the right would roll off the highs and slightly delay the signal going to the left output instead of just not routing signal to the left output.

[SteffenR]

Delay the left output? Really?

[Dave]

If I understand things correctly, yes, that’s how it works.

[SteffenR]

No, if you delay one output of a stereo signal, the panning shifts to one side.

Or do you talk about crossfeed?
That isn’t that simple. And contra productive in live sound monitoring.

But there are solutions available.
And it’s very impressive.

https://www.klang.com/personal-monitoring-systems/

[Dave]

No, if you delay one output of a stereo signal, the panning shifts to one side.

Yes, exactly, that’s why I was suggesting it.

Like, if you’re sending guitar to stereo aux 1 for IEMs, panning it left would slightly delay and roll a bit of highs off of the guitar signal being routed to stereo aux 1R, and leave the guitar signal being routed to stereo aux 1L alone.

Is that the “crossfeed” thing you mentioned?

[SteffenR]

Hmmm, I think you mixed things up.

The crossfeed is applied to the whole mix and mixes a bit of the left channel into the right channel and vice versa.

It is used in headphone preamps by SPL.
https://spl.audio/en/spl-produkt/phonitor-2/

The other thing mentioned is usable already. Make use of two channels, both with the same input signal.
You need to apply a short delay to one signal and mix it together with the other one and both need to be panned to opposite sides.

To do this with an output signal would shift the stereo image of the whole output channel to one side. I guess that’s not what you want.

[SteffenR]

Oh, I forgot to mention, introducing delays to achieve panning could affect the mono compatibility and is destroying phase coherency.
As always, the dose makes the poison.

[Dave]

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m only interested in the context of stereo IEMs. Mono compatibility isn’t much of an issue there 😁

[Author]

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