Best Technique for Fake Stereo?

Try Channel tools -Increased width preset. 
but having seen your post count im assuming you already know this lol   

Bibs

Craig Anderton has a good way to do this in one of his videos.  I dont remember exactly, but i think... 
1) clone a track twice giving you 3 tracks
2) Pan one dead center, one hard left, one hard right
3) Eq the hard left and right tracks to create stereo image placement...say high pass on one side and low pass on the other to match where the high notes and low notes live in the real world    

Brainworx Stereo Maker lets you adjust phase corallation ,,,,  It works well for me on a side bus or inserted on a track or a bus

You could try http://www.voxengo.com/product/stereotouch/

I like Nugen Steropack Its still 32 bits but it works fine under Bitbridge.

In addition to panning the original and the clone hard left and right with some small amount of delay, try also detuning the two tracks by a small amount, one up and one down.  This technique may very well be automated in some plugins but I'm unaware which ones.  'Image spreading' I think it's called.

Nugen Audio is on the right track. It's an easy thing to do manually, but the plug makes it much faster. Here's what I do:

1) Clone the track twice as mentioned earlier, giving you three tracks. 
2) Leave one centered and pan the other two hard left and right. 
3) Click the Phase button on one of the panned tracks and pull them back in from hard-left and hard-right until they sound about how you want. 
4) On the panned channels, put a high-pass filter in with a non-drastic slope between, say 300-500Hz.
5) On the centered channel, put an EQ with a gradual sloped Low-Pass of about 200-400 Hz (where you feel is right), so that centralized bass frequencies stay centered. 
6) Feel free to experiment with the EQ filters and panning, until you get what you're looking for. Don't be afraid to bring up the "filtered-out" frequencies on the centered channel if you think the higher frequencies missing there.
7) After doing this, you can play with delays, or echo tools, not to mention the free Flux STTool from Flux Home. 

Best of luck!!

tomixornot

Just came across this

http://www.musicradar.com...e-world-today-277953/3

Have not tried yet..

The plug-in's name is Upstereo (For those who haven't clicked the link).

I downloaded it and checked it out when you posted the link.

Oh my. It's a great VST.

The 'Air' control is excellent.

It seems to do it's best when you place it before a reverb.

It's a 32bit VST, but I've been using it for hours without a hiccup in X2-64bit which is a lot more than I can say for most 32bit VST's I've tried running through Bitbridge.

Shambler


You could try http://www.voxengo.com/product/stereotouch/

I tried this yesterday. I does a good job and it's free! 
Although it uses delay, I don't hear the undesirable "one side (that you hear first) sounds louder first and then the other side grows louder later" effect of the simple "delaying one channel slightly" technique (I haven't tried it in a mix so I can't tell for sure, though).

Thanks for posting the link.

@Bub: Sorry, I forgot the OP wasn't just looking for mono->stereo conversion. 

Two things I've used to create some nice tones......
     1) ADT (Auto-Double-Tracking) - http://www.kvraudio.com/product/adt_by_vacuumsound
         Does a really nice job of recreating the clone-pan-and-nudge technique but also has a few other settings (wow and flutter) to give the sound a little more life than simply delay.

     and,



     2) The DSP-Fx Chorus' Guitar Quadruple setting (http://www.dspfx.com).  I bought these quite a while ago and they are still quite relevant sound-wise albeit they are DX plugs.  These were included in Sonar (don't remember which version they debuted) with different interfaces.  The sonar version is FX-Chorus.  This plug sounds really great for widening/adding life to both stereo and mono guitar and rhodes tracks.


Best,
guitardood


EDIT: Also, +1 for the Voxengo StereoTouch

Easy and nice: Use really short (true stereo) convolution reverb, like <25 ms. Thick plate works well.

this is what brconflict says- but with a twist: 

If you're using a synth/soft synth as the sound source you could try this to 'fake' a mid-side recording:

Record a midi track using a piano as the voice (just for this example)
create a mono audio track of the piano from the midi track
clone the track- now you'll have two mono piano tracks
call the first track 'mid' and the second track 'side' and pan each in the MIDDLE
create an effect send send using a reverb you like
on the mid track, add just a touch of reverb
on the side track add a good bit to the point that it's pretty wet
bounce each track separately to MONO tracks WITH the effects
Mute the two original tracks (not the bounced tracks)
You'll now have two mono tracks with mono effects- the "side" track will be a bit more wet than the mid track



Here's the important step:

clone the bounced 'side' track and put the cloned track out of phase (only ONE can be out of phase, otherwise this wont work)
pan each of these 'side' tracks full hard right and full hard left (create a stereo image from the two tracks)
lower the volume on the two 'side' tracks to off
hit play and listen to the mono mid track
slowly raise the faders (grouped so they move at the same time) until you hear the stereo image come into place.



I tried this with the Lexicon Reverb that came with 8.5 using a large hall and it worked nicely to create a broad stereo image.

a common plug I use to enhance stereo effect or turn mono to stereo:

http://www.vescofx.com/vfxFreeHaas