Frequency doesn't solo Stereo bands correctly in listen mode

Cubase 11 and Cubase 12 do not solo correctly when listening to side information only.
Instead, what happens is when trying to listen to side information you hear mono information.

An example of how it actually should be can be heard with FabFilter Pro-Q3.

The heard signal should be the diff in both left and right channels without the summing of the middle, instead we only hear the mono even when soloing the stereo.
The attached image shows an example of scenario in which it can be heard.

Are you sure ? When I activate auto-listen and tweak Side settings I only hear the side information. It works as intended. No issue here.

Also you are perhaps misunderstanding the terms mono/stereo and mid/side which are not the same things.
A Stereo track is made of two mono channels, Left and Right.
When you want to monitor the Mid and Side information, it has to be decoded into M/S, which are also two mono channels.

  • Mid = L + R, and Side = L - R.
  • Mid results in the same thing as listening to your stereo track in mono. You cannot hear Mid without the Side.
  • Side is everything that is not identical in both L and R. The resulting Side information is a mono signal. You cannot hear Side in stereo.

If it seems there’s Mid information when you monitor the Side, that’s most probably because in your mix, some vocals or other instruments that need to be in the Center has been spread too much, resulting in a leak in the Side channel, of the same frequencies there already are in the Mid. Nothing to worry about.

Alright, I’ve found the issue.
When Auto Listen is active, dragging a band directly from the graph causes the M/S selection to revert to M, consequently causing the listening of the Mid channel.

You complain about an issue but you never explained how to replicate it… Hopefully there’s someone to do it for you.

Well, I tried explaining the issue and also my image shows it exactly (as it says it is in listen in side mode for band2).

But what you’re saying is that when you tweak side settings from the control knob this doesn’t happen?
In cubase 11 I know tweaking through the control knob also did not work correctly. In 12 I tried only through dragging on the screen so I’ll try the knob as well.

Nevertheless, definitely a bug. This is why I gave Pro-Q as an example because in Pro-Q when you solo the sides you hear only the side information like you should.

That’s right, tweaking from the control knobs doesn’t do this

Ok checked now. With the knob it sounds mono as well (tried all knobs).
Also, compared to Pro-Q. Try to do the same you’ll hear how weird something really sounds when you get only side information.

I even thought that I should check myself further to be sure that all side information is emitted in Frequency no matter what I do - and that there’s no Mid info in Pro-Q so I opened my UAD Console (you could probably do the same with the control room).
I clicked Mono there and solo with knob, with band, in a bunch of ways the Frequency and also kept hearing the signal exactly as I did when Mono was not on on UAD.
Then, still Mono on UAD, I listened to the same Side area with Pro-Q and - No sound at all, perfect null since the Pro-Q really let you listen only to the side information so you have no more Mid.

Try the same you’ll hear the difference.

I’m already aware about what you are talking about, and this is not an issue. At all.

Here’s why :

Some plugins, when you solo Side, keep the phase correlated, making it a Mono signal, which stays the same when you monitor the output in Mono, because the original signal is already 100% Mono.
Of course, this Mono signal only contains the Side information from the source audio, there is no Mid in it.
This is the most natural way to monitor the Side. The great majority of plugins do it that way.

Some plugins, when you solo Side, rotate the phase by 90 degrees. The correlometer will show -1, and the phasescope will show a flat horizontal line. That means what you have in your left ear is completely different that what you have in your right ear. The L and R phases are totaly uncorrelated (100% “stereo”). Since the phases are not correlated (centered), monitoring the output in Mono will result in no audio because there is no Mid information.

That can be confusing for some people because when they solo the Side, they are expecting to listen to it in “stereo”, without hearing the center. But as I said earlier in this topic, Side is a mono channel because it is calculated L-R, it results in only one waveform.
Since your track is a stereo track, the calculated Side is outputted on L and R at the same time, the same way as when you record mono instruments on a stereo track. Plugins that rotate the phase 90 degrees are kinda faking it, it makes you hear the Side in a pseudo-stereo but there is absolutely no movement in it. The only thing it does is delaying the signal between L and R, but this signal is the same. This is the exact principle of the Haas effect.
I’m personally not a fan of this method.

Hope that will help you.

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Alright got it. Thanks for the explanation.
I do still think it makes more sense to hear the separated channels because then you can actually know what’s going on in either side, but what you’re saying makes sense.
The implementation of most mid/side EQs though lets you hear the separated channels that are completely out of phase and I really think this is a better way to handle things. I guess that’s up to Steinberg to decide :blush:

No it doesn’t work like that ! Side is always a mono signal, there is NO left side and right side.
I have edited my last post so you can understand better.

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Ohhhh!! Got it now, thank you for the edit.

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