Cubase 11 Surround output weirdness

Hi there,
I work in surround in Cubase 11.0.20 on my Mac Catalina.
I’ve come across a bit of an anomaly when I tried outputting a mono channel to the Ls and Rs channels…
If I set the output of a mono Audio channel’s routing to ‘Left’ then I see on the 5.1 meter (Master Output) that the audio is playing out of just the left channel.
If I set the output to ‘Right’ then I see on the meter that the audio is playing out of just the right channel. Same thing for the Centre channel.
When I select to play out of the Lfe channel there is nothing on the meter (?) - no playback.
But, if I set the output routing to Ls (left surr) then the 5.1 meter shows the sound coming out of the L and Ls at the same time - at the same volume! I hear the same thing in the room. Does anyone understand why this would be? I can’t figure it out… in my VST Connections I have the first 6 channel allocated an output of my audio interface. I’ve tried using ‘Built In Audio’ in case it was a device specific issue but the same thing happened…
In my VST Connections I had a Stereo ‘child bus’ to my 5.1 output which I deleted - same issue happens…
Could it be because I’m directly outputting to the Ls/Rs channel rather than say listening to a 5.1 reverb? (Waves IR360)
I’m sure it won’t mess with my work methods as all sounds ok with the reverb levels in my template… I’d just like to understand why this happens.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance…

How? Panner? Which one?

in the main Output Routing in the Inspector
Screenshot 2021-06-07 at 12.53.44

Outputting to the Left Surround plays out of the L and Ls speakers/meters…

The levels are identical… weird

under your 5.1 is a “Stereo Out” present… maybe this gets routed as well?

st10ss - thanks for your reply - but I thought the same thing and deleted the stereo path and still get the same behavior. I thought it was an Audio Interface issue - but these are outputs from Cubase to wherever you need tham - it also happened when I switched Asio drive to the Build In Audio. Anyone have any thoughts?

AHHH - I’ve got it…

In my template the VST Multipanner was active and had Radius set to 50% If I set it to 100% (or bybass the panner) everything behaves as I would expect. Weird - if I create a new 5.1 Audio Channel it will default to Radius = 0% on the panner…
Maybe that setting didn’t translate well from one verions of Cubase to another… or something…

See below for the way my Output master bus was set:


Thanks all. :slight_smile:

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