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[Seattle_tech]

Hey there everyone.  First post and all...

So anyways, I am running FOH at a decent sized church with a quite nice Meyer Sound speaker system set up for the room.  There is very little acoustic trickery that needs to be done live to get a great sound.

Here's my question: the system is set up so that after the BSS Soundweb there is a stereo mix available to send different signals for left/right.  In a recording, it would make sense to pan certain instruments left/right and create a feel in the sound of where the musicians are.  But this is live audio, and I feel that the people on the right side of the house should be able to hear everything happening on stage equally.  

The other FOH mixers very much disagree with me, and pan pretty hard.

So in a large (1500+ seat) house, do you pan certain instruments, or provide a mono mix so that even the people on the far sides of the house can enjoy everything?

[Tom Young]

In a properly designed and implemented stereo or LCR reinforcement ldspkr system you can mix in stereo but hardly ever do you hard pan to one side or the other.  More often than not you pan no more than to about 3:00 and 9:00.

So the answer lies some where in between.

One of the criteria for successful stereo or LCR is that each cluster covers all of the audience. If set up this way then far more people can hear both sides of the stereo mix.

[Kevin Maxwell AKA TheMAXX]

Here is a little experiment for you. Put something thru the sound system and pan it all the way to one side and then walk the room and see if that one side covers the whole room. Now do it for the other side. That will tell you if half of the stereo system is designed to cover the whole room. Don’t forget to walk all the way to the front on both sides also. I agree with Tom I would never pan something all the way to one side during a service. How does it sound to the audience when some of the other people are mixing?

[Seattle_tech]

There is a pretty defined L/R split, with little to no difference front/back.  Those guys at Meyer Sound know their stuff.

For the other mixers, they usually don't pan too hard (with the exception of drum OH, they stop at about 50%), and people in the audience like the mix.  Its hard to tell with a church, because everyone is so friendly that I sincerely doubt you would hear a bad word if there was one to be said.

Thanks for your opinions.  

[Kevin Maxwell AKA TheMAXX]

If I am interpreting your response properly the left side speakers are only heard by the people sitting on the left and the right side speakers are only heard by the people sitting on the right. That would mean that this system is not the kind that you want to pan anything. Because anything panned to the left would not be heard at all by anyone sitting on the right and anything panned to the right would not be heard by anyone sitting on the left. Is this what you meant to say?

The purpose of panning (pan pot – panoramic potentiometer) is to give dimension or depth to the mix but if all it is doing in your system is muting it to the side it is panned away from or decreasing its intensity in the mix to that side then it is not accomplishing the desired effect of panning. It sound like the only people that will be benefited by panning in this system would be dead center and are far out numbered by the people that will get a mix that will be lacking something.

By my question of how it sounds to the audience, I assume that since you don’t mix all of the time that sometimes you are in the audience seating area and are listening. So how does it sound to you during a service?

[Mike Sveda]

If you have to record stereo from the main outputs of the console, then I would configure the BSS to do a mono output to the house so everyone hears the same things no matter where you sit.

Otherwise I would take a stereo recording off a pair of group outputs or matrix outs and feed the BSS a mono main signal.

[ProSoundWeb Community]