Spectral Panning

Dear Behringer Team,

I really love mixing with the Behringer WING.

As many other mixing desks the wings panning is simply intensity panning which brings a couple of drawbacks.

When playing in large audiences intensity panning does not work for everybody in the audience because not everybody is hearing both speakers, so i.e. if there is two guitars and both of them are panned hard left and right, a large portion of the audience does not hear the correct level balances of the mix. A workaround is to broaden the stereo width of a source i.e. with the Velvet Imager, which creates a sense of width but this does not give cues for localisation of the instruments on stage.

A way to overcome this is proposed by Tonmeister Prof. Carsten Kümmel in this Interview:

He is proposing a so called spectral panning, which means that the fundamental frequencies of the Instruments or voices remain relatively untouched while the overtones get attenuated. This is also representative of the human hearing as large wavelengths diffract around the head while short wavelengths do not.

I have simulated this effect with the help of the FABIAN (TU-Berlin) HRTF Dataset which you can see in the attached Plot.
Furthermore it would be also possible to add a slight time delay depending on the angle of the source. For the angles shown in the plot, the Delays would be:

• 5°: 0,05 ms

• 10°: 0,07 ms

• 15°: 0,08 ms

• 20°: 0,13 ms

• 25°: 0,20 ms

• 30°: 0,25 ms

The combfiltering these delays would create when mono summed is negligible, because of the level differences in the relevant frequencies, so it is mono compatible.

The frequency responses that I have shown in the plot don’t have to be matched accurately, it should be possible to approach similar frequency responses with maybe 3-4 IIR Filters.

As of dsp power: This should be optional to the traditional panning, it could be also possible to trade i.e. an Insertslot for this (in the same way it is with the automixer).

Pros and cons of this panning approach:

pro:

• all audience members hear all instruments

• audience members that hear both sides of the PA get a sense localisation of the Instrument on stage

• mono compatible (needed i.e. for centerfill applications)

• when an audience member is standing on one side of the PA the instruments on the far side of the stage sound more dull and there for further away in terms of psychoacoustics.

• overall sound gets warmer when in use

• works great on headphones

contra:

• the localisation on the centre of the audience is not as sharp as with traditional intensity panning

• overall sound gets more dull

I know there is a long Wishlist but I hope you will get to this one at some point. In the meanwhile i really like all the features that came with Version 3.x.x, keep up the great work!

Best Regards

Johannes Hofmann