Mid-Side Question

[Telesto]

Hello,

I am trying to achieve a proper mid-side balance for a set.

I have achieved this with the exception of a couple instruments.

For them, I am having trouble understanding a placement issue.

I have one track that is panned hard left and one that is panned hard right.

They both live inside a group which is panned center (it makes no sense to me to pan it otherwise).

My question is:

If the group is panned to the center, how does that affect the placement of the tracks that are panned hard left and right?

It is odd. When I solo the track that is panned hard left and look at the Polar Level Sound Field in Insight 2, it shows activity only on the left side.

When I solo the track that is panned hard right, the Sound Field in Insight 2 shows activity only on the right side.

When I solo the two together, there is a significant amount of activity in the center. Perhaps this is natural, but I do not understand why it is so.

I am using Kontakt instruments and inside each instrument the pan position is set to reflect its pan position in the DAW.

I have checked all the other associated plugins on each track and the group for panning properties and there are none. I can see nothing else but the group pan position which could cause this.

If the group pan position is the problem I would have to reconsider the value of grouping tracks that have different pan positions.

So I find myself on unfamiliar ground and I cannot find any references to the issue on the web and I would rather not try to force a solution.

I appreciate any thoughts you would like to share on the matter.

[Exie]

The answer is signal correlation. Both "mid" and "side" are there when the instruments partially correlate. There will be "side" with no "mid" if it's the same signal with inverted phase, and there would be silence when a mix is converted to mono