Stereo and Surround Panning in Practice
David Griesinger · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2002
The apparent position of speech and music sound sources was investigated using both a two channel loudspeaker array and a three channel loudspeaker array. The results showed that a sine-cosine pan law was reasonably accurate for the three channel array, but consistently produced sharp images who’s positions were consistently wider than expected with a two channel array. The discrepancy was investigated using a headphone model. We found the apparent position depends strongly on the spectrum of the source, with speech frequencies tending to dominate the overall impression.