MID/SIDE PROCESSING IN CUBASE 10

Despite heading towards its 90th birthday and having an ever-increasing number of multichannel upstarts snapping at its heels, the stereo format remains by far the most widely used channel set-up in music making. It's easy to work with, delivers a realistic sense of space and depth, and does not require vast arrays of amps and speakers in order to reproduce the aural image. However, there's a different way of representing a stereophonic sound field: Mid/Side, or M/S, encoding.

Just like conventional Left/Right stereo, M/S uses two discrete mono audio signals, but with one carrying the 'mid' signal, the other carrying the 'side' signal. Technically speaking, the mid signal is the sum of the left and right signals, whilst the side signal is the difference between them. Thus, when summing L/R signals for the mid channel, component sounds that are centrally panned will have the