What's the best tool in SONAR for widening the stereo field?

Gotta widen some tracks, and add width to an old mix that was transferred from a cassette, and looking for some recommendations.

Within Sonar my vote goes to Channel Tools.  Don't know how this will work with an entire mix though.

Ozone also has a widener. 

There are widening plugs. Some are OK some not so much. 

If live recording, double the track   of  the acoustic guitar by recording it 2 times and pan it wide. 


If you have the option to be able to work on tracks and not the entire mix.... you can take something like the acoustic guitar (assuming it has one in it) and clone it, nudge it a bit, one way or the other, and pan it hard. It's better to record a second track but that is not always an option on the older tunes. 


By widening just one instrument that is in the entire song.... like the acoustic might be, you get the widening on that instrument without blurring the rest of the mix. The one instrument widened tricks the brain into hearing the entire mix as wider, and you still have good definition in the rest of the mix. 


The problem as I see it with the plugs that supposedly widen the mix is that they apply the widening to the entire song and the song looses it's character into the mess of widening.... sounds like reverb or chorus applied to the entire song. I don't think  I have ever heard a widening plug that I really liked when it was applied to the entire song. It is a whole different matter when it is applied to one or two selected tracks in a song. 


my 2 cents.

Yep, check out the Increased Width preset in Channel Tools. Notice the parameters that are changed and adjust from there.

Scott

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Channel tools ? I use it alot ....its great imo

FastBikerBoy


Sonitus phase will also do a mighty fine job of widening a mix.

+1! Simple to use and effective.
 
-Danny

The new waves silver offer has the S1 Stereo Enhancer. (Can we mention that now that Cake has offered it to us? Yea I think so.)

What I find interesting is that people are too quick in terms of slamming your entire mix through some arbitrary effect like a widener. I take the Hi Fi approach. Would you really want to do that? Although you may gain something in terms of widening you will loose something else in the process. (I can guarantee it. If you did a controlled A/B test with and without the effect over a mono speaker I bet you will pick the version without the widener as nicer)  

Do your research and really find out what a widener is doing. You may be surprised. (they distort phase and time on purpose and mess with EQ. Do you want to run your mix through that!) If you have got a stuff on your masterbuss then maybe you should take it all off and see if you can create the same vibe back at track and buss level. Leave your masterbuss alone. (gentle two buss compression is a slightly different thing and I don't have a problem with that) 
It is poor man's way of saying Oh my mix is not wide enough so now I need to widen it. Go back to your mixing and do the widening back at mix level. Also what Herb is saying is also very true. It might only be one or two things in your whole mix that need widening. Find them and do it there. Leave everything else alone.

A mix is a much more complex signal than a track or a buss. Any effect might be good at track level but may not do so well on a very complex signal. Converting stereo to M/S and altering the M/S balance is OK (and probably the best option, Channel Tools sounds OK as well) but you can also do the same thing in your mix too.

This advice is also applying to mixes that you are creating yourself not the OP that did transfer an older mix from a cassette and wanted to widen it. OK you might be able to do something with a widener over that and of course that is your only option as you do not have the original mix to work with. But for those of us that do have control over the mixing phase all I am saying is do more at mix level and less at masterbuss level and you will be rewarded with a better sound in the long run.

These are great suggestions. I'm dealing with old board tapes of a local band that are in mono and I wanted to give them a little more life. Sadly I have no control over the finished mix on the tape. So far channel tools has helped. It's a great plug-in that I've never really used before despite having it since SONAR 8.

  There’s also the Open Ambience Project’s SHEPPi freebie. Works also for narrowing the stereo field. Instead of using a spatial enhancer (or whatever) for the whole mix, you might try to use one only for your reverb bus return. When you have the original multitrack recording, that is. Haven’t tried that trick for a mono/stereo recording, but that might work, too: keep the straight signal as it is, add a reverb send with a spatial enhancer, mix to taste.