Stereo and M/S

Every band in Outboard-EQ runs on exactly one of three buses: Stereo, Mid, or Side. The plugin encodes M/S once per sample at the top of the chain and decodes it cleanly at the end, so routing a band to Side never touches the L/R image until the very end.

Bus routing

Stereo

The default. L and R are processed identically by the band's filter cascade. Use Stereo for any move that should affect the whole image equally.

Mid

Routes the band to the Mid sum (L+R) only. Boost or cut here changes the centre of the image — vocals, kick, snare, bass — without touching what's panned wide.

Side

Routes the band to the Side difference (L−R) only. Boost or cut here changes the stereo information — reverb tails, overheads, ambience — without touching what sits in the middle.

Pick the bus from the band's right-click menu → M/S.

How M/S is implemented

The plugin encodes the incoming stereo signal into Mid and Side once per sample, dispatches each of the eight bands to its chosen bus, then decodes back to L/R at the end. The encode/decode is lossless — a band with M/S routing left at Stereo behaves exactly as if M/S processing were never engaged.

Typical workflows

Vocal de-essing in M only

Set a high-frequency Peak band to Mid routing, engage Dynamic EQ with the Tight env shape and a small negative range. The de-esser will only act on the centre information, so any backing vocals or reverb in the sides keep their air.

Side-only low cut

Set a LowCut band to Side routing at ~150 Hz. The mono low end stays untouched but the sides get cleaned up — useful for mastering tracks where the bass is wider than it should be.

Tilt only the centre

Use a TiltShelf band on Mid to brighten or darken the centre image without re-balancing the sides.

Tips

• M/S and Stereo bands can be mixed freely. A typical mastering chain might have a wide HighCut on Stereo, a tilt on Mid, and a presence boost on Side — all in the same instance.
• M/S routing is independent of channel mask. On surround layouts, channel mask gates per channel; M/S still applies to channels 0/1 only and is meaningful in stereo and stereo-bed-of-surround contexts.

See also

• Band controls
• Surround and Dolby Atmos
• Global stages (master bus) for Mono Maker and other M/S tools.