Waves Audio S360 User Guide

Waves S360° Panner, Imager

Software Audio Processors

User’s Guide

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S360° Panner

S360° Imager

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Introduction and Overview

Introducing Waves S360°, a Surround Panning and Imaging tool for 5 or 5.1
channels. It offers an alternative to surround X/Y panners, allowing better control
of Phantom images, and providing better localization as well as an enhanced
sweet spot. The S360° Panner lets you set the Rotation and Width for a Mono,
Stereo, 5-channel or 5.1-channel, Surround source in the surround mix.

The S360° Imager is an enhanced panner, adding Room Model Early
Reflections for distance panning and Shuffling for enhanced low frequency width.
These tools assure you get the flexibility and control you need for creating both
spatial and discrete images in the common 5-channel and 5.1-channel formats,
providing the best translation to the typical target playback scenario.

The Waves 360° Surround Toolkit follows the reproduction standards
recommended by the International Telecommunications Union in the ITU-R
BS.775 (1993) specification. It also provides the means to handle some common
compromises and variations of this standard. The S360°’s versatility allows it to
complement other imaging tools and X/Y panners. You will find it the tool of
choice for working on soundtracks or music for the best reproduction in Home
Theater systems.

We believe that, with practice, surround will become as easy to work with as
stereo. There is, however, a potential problem with how the consumer’s actual
playback system is configured and calibrated. Even if the playback system is fully
calibrated and conformed to ITU recommendations, this is not the ideal array for
playing a spatial 360° spherical sound field, but it is the common one in
consumer electronics.

The general tip here would be not to rely on precision side Phantoms for
stationary sounds. Discrete side rotation is bound to be heard as a general
sideways event. It is, however, possible to reach beautiful, spatial, and
atmospheric-sounding results if you follow a few basic rules.

OVERVIEW FOR S360° PANNER AND IMAGER

S360° Panner:

The Panner is quite DSP efficient, and it is intended for multi-instance use. All
source channels can be mixed into the surround image using this Panner rather
than the default X/Y Panner.

You can set the Rotation angle for the Center of the source image. Directly under
the Rotation control you can select a Rotation Pan Pot. The two Pan Pots

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available in S360° are Pair-wise or Triple-wise. They use speaker pairs or triplets
to calculate the required energy distribution for the indicated rotation.

You can set the Width Ratio to change the width of the image using one of the
available Width Pan Pots located directly under the Width ratio box. The
divergence will always be related to the rotation, so that, when widening an
image, it will always spread sideways from its center or collapse toward a mono
image.

Since the 6th, or the .1 channel, is not part of the 3/2 directional speaker array,
you can send a sum of the input audio to the LFE channel.

The use of the Center speaker can be specified in %. From full hard center
usage to a complete phantom center created from the L & R speakers. Any value
in between can be used as a balance, defining how much Center should be used
to create the current Rotation/Width settings.

The panning graph displays a splined-circle energy scope, which indicates the
same information that the meters display.

S360° Imager:

The S360° Imager has the same Control and feature set as the Panner, plus
Distance Panning and Shuffling.

Distance Panning generates Room Model Early Reflections, balancing the direct
sound and reflections creates the “Distance” and the specified room size affects
the sound of the reflections. Shuffling is used on low frequencies for control of
low frequency width.

The S360° Imager uses more DSP than the Panner. You can maximize your
DSP resources by starting with a Panner and, if you find the need, hot swapping
with an Imager. Your Panner settings are imported into the Imager and you can
further add distance and shuffling.

The Imager’s room Early Reflections are designed to work well with the rich,
decorrelated Reverb tail of the Waves R360° surround Reverb, for a complete
Room emulation. The virtual environment can work with an R360° on a
multichannel auxiliary to which you send or bus all your imagers. Each imager
will provide the Early reflections of the source calculating the reflections
according to the rotation of the panned source. This enhances the possible
localization compared to generating reflections for a multichannel source.

S360 PLUG-INS COMPONENTS

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