Great stuff here!!

you know, i was listening to an old favorite of mine, a instrumental band called "Brand X" did a song called "The Poke", off the MASQUE album.

the mix:

it's mostly mono, panned center...

but then, occasionally the guitars will break left/right, the keys will do the same, and pan out in stereo with moving pans, but mostly it all sits centered.

and because of the way the band plays, and the sounds/tones they use, it totally works.


http://youtu.be/mlHtvbCTfmA

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mlHtvbCTfmA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

or

http://grooveshark.com/s/The+Poke/4zcWAE?src=5

another interesting hard panned song:

todd rundgren, 'i saw the light'

http://grooveshark.com/s/..w+The+Light/DxlBJ?src=5

today i've been enjoying delta blues on pandora (muddy waters station with some john lee hooker), and i've noticed a lot of LCR. probably wouldn't have as much, if i hadn't seen this thread , but i've got to be honest - it added a vibe to the songs that i really liked. it wasn't distracting, it just added a strange kind of depth, even when the entire trap set was coming out of the right speaker, or the vocal was on one side and the guitar on the other.

a lot of the music was live, and all of it was old, so i assume the LCR switch came into play and a modern day remix would probably "fix" those "issues". and i realize that the LCR conversation isn't really about drums hard right and vocals hard left, but what it comes back to for me is experimentation and finding something deeper in the music than wave forms and phase and knobs and buttons.

Don't forget too that when you reproducing an LCR mix in a room with two speakers you are going to loose some of the apparent extreme panning of the L and R sides just due to natural room reflections and reverb and acoustics of the listening space. The effect will become less pronounced. Extreme LCR panning may be required in order to achieve more natural panning in the room created by the speakers.

Maybe mixes that use all pan positions may be better suited to headphone listening. I would imagine an LCR mix might sound a bit strange on headphones.

MOST PRO MIXES.

have elements of LCR, if not fully LCR....
and they sound great.

not strange at all.