Instrumental seems to turn mono, all centred after vocals

Alright, I myself do not currently use Cubase, but I’m a producer.
I have produced instrumentals and sent them to a friend overseas to record on.
Obviously my instrumentals are stereo and you can hear all sorts of panning / placement etc in them,
But when I send them to him, and he records his vocals over them in Cubase, the instrumentals are coming out centred. Like all the sounds are on top of each other in the middle, you cannot hear any panning, and you can obviously tell when listening through monitors or headphones.

He however says the he isn’t exporting in mono etc and isn’t sure what he’s doing wrong

Just curious if anyone knows what different options could be causing this so I can run through them with him?
I physically can’t look at his computer and it is absolutely doing my head in because the tracks are great but just coming out bad because of this
Please help!!

Hi and welcome,

It would be helpful to send some screenshots, if possible.

If he is really not exporting a mono file (you can check, if the file is mono or stereo), I could imagine scenarios like:

  • Mono Group Channel, where is the signal routed.
  • Mono Output Bus.
  • Wrong (mono) Bus selected during export.
  • Combined panner set to the 0 width.
  • Mono output settings in the Control Room.
  • If you send exported stereo Mixdown, this was imported to the Mono track.