Based on your other posts, it seems this is for a church.
First, are you sure the church is actually wanting to use a stereo output for their FOH speakers. Just because there is a pair of speakers on the L&R side of the room doesn’t mean the system is set up to output stereo. In fact, many church sanctuaries have their seating so that a stereo image is only heard by very few people and by mixing in stereo it simply means people don’t hear things that are panned away from the speaker in front of them. Therefore it is very common for PA systems to be using “mono”. In this case, the system might only have the speakers plugged into the right output and there isn’t a speaker plugged into the left output. As MikeC mentioned, it could also be a routing issue where the speakers are both set up to receive the right signal.
Now ideally the system should be set up to use mono FOH outputs instead of one side of a stereo image. That way you don’t have issues like this were panning can negatively affect the FOH audio.
Second, if you decide to use a stereo output for the FOH speakers, you need to walk the room and determine how much panning is appropriate. If the church has a center isle, then no one is sitting in the “sweet spot” of the stereo image. A large portion of the congregation will tend to hear only the audio coming out of the speaker in front of them – especially the closer to the speaker they are sitting. This means if you pan something hard to the left side, the people on the right side aren’t going to hear that audio at all. Even if you pan something 75% left and 25% right, this means the people on the right will hear that audio level at a level 50% less than normal. Most won’t hear the audio from the left side at all.
Keep this in mind when you are making panning decisions.
