I worried about mono compatibility for a few seconds and then thought "I like how it sounds" and forgot about worrying.
 
A casual supposition is that it is not much more of a delay than you hear with ORTF, and that collapses without to much concern.
 
FWIW, I am just speaking of S-1 Imager, not the Shuffler, which I have but will admit I am not familiar with.

mike_mccue
 
FWIW, I am just speaking of S-1 Imager, not the Shuffler, which I have but will admit I am not familiar with.

I know nothing about the Shuffler plug-in.  I'm talking about S-1 Imager.  It has a Shuffle control on the UI.  Take a quick look at the documentation.  From it I infer the Shuffler plug has a subset of capabilities of Imager.
 
PS, what is ORTF?

I guess I just don't know anything about "shuffling" or where it is on the S-1 Stereo Imager GUI
 

 
The thing I like about S-1 is that the result I am describing results from simply turning the rotation slider. A single adjustment and I hear a distinct difference.
 
This illustrates what I hear:
 

 

 

 
I've posted links to these screen shots in the past and found that many viewers don't have the attention span to notice the salient detail that it clearly illustrates, but I'm confident if you look carefully you'll see what I am talking about.
 
Drew recognized the detail and once commented that the time shift is very very very small, and indeed it is. I find it remarkable that this very small difference makes, in my opinion, a dramatic difference to what I hear.
 
I'd like to emphasize that I heard this effect first and then after appreciating it for a year or so, I stopped making music long enough to go run some tests and figure out exactly why I enjoyed what I was hearing. I thought it was pretty cool.
 
 

mike_mccue
I guess I just don't know anything about "shuffling" or where it is on the S-1 Stereo Imager GUI
 
I've posted links to these screen shots in the past and found that many viewers don't have the attention span to notice the salient detail that it clearly illustrates, but I'm confident if you look carefully you'll see what I am talking about.

As I said, I never actually used S-1 - it came in the Silver bundle (my name is David and I'm a gasaholic).  The user interface picture in my S-1 manual has two extra sliders next to Gain and Width which are labeled Shuffle and Freq.  These controls are not on the S-1 screen image on the S-1 page at Waves.  I'd be curious whether you find it in your copy of the manual.
 
As to your screen shots, the phenomena you mention is evident (but only if you look closely).
 
Maybe we ought to drop this line of discussion, though ... at least in this forum.  We are veering *way* off topic and are hardly contributing to promoting knowledge of SONAR.  Forum moderators, please excuse the transgression. 

Hi David,
 I have to make a confession. I have made a mistake of sorts, and I am going to admit it.
 
 I just took a moment to replicate the results shown in my screen shots on my current DAW and I could not replicate my own results!!!
 
Now, before people say "ah hah MQ's an idiot" let me explain further.
 
I was so distraught to learn about this mistake that I fired up my moth ball DAW and found the original test I had made.
 
Here's what I found: On my old DAW I am running an ancient S-1 Imager, version 5, and it does indeed exhibit the characteristic I am describing. So, I went to my new DAW and confirmed that I had the exact same settings in S-1 and sure enough the timing on the left and right channel match perfectly with the new version (well to be honest it looked like the right channel was a single sample, at 44.1kHz, late, but that could just be the wave form drawing).
 
For my current DAW I purchased a Native Power Pack license because I find I only use 2 wave products S-1 and De-esser. So on the current DAW I am running Waves version 9.01.
 
The two S-1 versions have significantly different output. I don't know why, but I just confirmed it by running both DAWs back to back.
 
Anyways... now I know why a lot of folks can't hear what I say I've been hearing for all these years...
 
...but I have also confirmed to myself, once again, that expectation bias is extremely powerful because I had not noticed the fact that there was no longer anything to notice.
 
So there it is. I feel foolish at this point but I'm willing to stand up and say "wow"... I think I'm gonna go make some music. :-)
 
 

mike_mccue
ah hah MQ's an idiot

Finally! Some company!

My favorite of the Waves spacial tools is the PS22 XSplit plugin. I know it's primarily a mono-to-stereo processor but it can also widen (and rotate) stereo tracks as well. I'm definitely still an audio amateur, but to my ears it's the most authentic (and mono-compatible) widening technique available to me. It spreads the frequencies across the stereo field from top to bottom in a wave pattern (you can adjust from a sine wave to a square wave), which collapses to mono almost perfectly.