Stereo Sound Panning - How to have an audio completely mute on my right or left ear

[leocunha11]

Hello there! My problem, to me, feels like something simple, but I'm not able to do it. You know when you have your earphones on and you can only hear from one side? Well, my earphones are working completely normally, but I want to replicate exactly that in a sound: get a stereo sound, kill the mids and the right side, for example, and only get the content coming from the left ear. Is that possible?

I tried, for example, to pan the stereo audio left, but the sound coming from the middle still reflects on my right ear

[Philbo King]

Pan pot fully anticlockwise.
If you don't have a pan pot, unplug the right speaker.

[Wonks]

For a start, you’d have to put the monitors either side of your head. And you’d then have to be in an anechoic chamber to stop any reverb.

The fact is that you’ll never get a headphone-style experience with the standard speakers in front of you in a normal room arrangement.

Some stereo widening plugins can play with phase and make sounds appear to come from a place wider out than the speakers, but it’s still not like headphones and it plays havoc with mono compatability.

[BillB]

Hi Leo and welcome to the forum. There will be much more expert voices along soon but: only headphones can provide the acoustic isolation between your ears to ensure sound is only heard by one ear. Normal sounds, even coming fully from your left or right, will be bounced around an acoustic environment, like a typical room, and some of that sound will get to your other ear. That’s how your ears are supposed to work, to determine the direction of sounds around you.
The only other way I can think of to do this would be in an anechoic chamber which kills all reflections, so only direct sound would get to one ear, and even then, there might be some bending of pressure waves or transmission through your head....
So, unless I have misunderstood your purpose, it is not so much a mixing issue as a listening environment issue.
Edit: snap, Wonks.

[tea for two]

get a stereo sound, kill the mids and the right side, for example, and only get the content coming from the left ear. Is that possible?

I tried, for example, to pan the stereo audio left, but the sound coming from the middle still reflects on my right ear

I have very probably misunderstood.

I use Gain plugin bundled in Logic to make a sound Mono then I pan. This way the sound is pretty much only from the location of the pan.
There should be bundled plugin with your daw to do this.

[Hugh Robjohns]

...get a stereo sound, kill the mids and the right side, for example, and only get the content coming from the left ear. Is that possible?

It is. You just need to kill the right channel. You may be able to do that natively in your DAW, or via a stereo formatting plugin.

If you're starting with a stereo source it would be easiest if you route it via two mono channels, rather than a stereo channel. Stereo channels usually have BALANCE controls, rather than PAN controls (which only apply to mono channels).

Balance controls vary in design, but they are intended to pull the centre left or right, and generally leave the edges alone (or only partially attenuated). They rarely kill one side completely.

If you can route your stereo source via two mono channels you can pan both channels hard to one side, or pan one left and the other right and simply fade out one channel.

[Sam Spoons]

We are making the assumption that you are listening on speakers but is that the case? If you are then as others have said, you can't prevent sound from the right speaker getting to your left ear, I doubt you could even in an anechoic chamber. So the simple answer is 'No, it is not possible in a 'normal' environment.

[Wonks]

I doubt you could even in an anechoic chamber.

Bass, no, as the long wavelength sound waves will still wrap around your head. But upper mids and treble, yes, as long as the volume wasn't loud enough to induce detectable transmission though bone. And it really was a very good anechoic chamber.

[leocunha11]

Just as a clarification, I'm using a headset called Astro A40, even if I completely pan the audio to the right, I still can hear it in my left side of my headset, Im not sure if it is my headset which is doing that by itself... Looks like its not the case because my phone have stereo sound output as well and I can also reproduce that behavior on my phone.

[Sam Spoons]

Try a different pair of headphones, preferably a closed back design. If the problem goes away it's the headphones causing it, if it stays it's something happening in your DAW/computer causing it.

[Hugh Robjohns]

There are several possible causes.

First, you need to find out whether your 'pan' control is actually muting the opposite channel when fully panned to one side. You can check by looking at the output meters...

As I mentioned earlier, stereo channels normally have balance controls which rarely fully mute the opposite side.

Secondly, check whether your headphone amp has a cross-feed facility. This is sometimes switchable, but in some computer and gaming systems it is permanently engaged to give a sound stage more reminiscent to listening on speakers look for options to turn off any environmental synthesising parameters in the computer, phone, or headphone amp.

And lastly, it could be due to crosstalk in the headphone cable. This is especially problematic if the cable has a relatively high impedance or poor grounding. Since most headphones have a three-wire connection (left channel, right channel, and shared return), a signal exclusively in one channel will generate a small voltage across the common ground wire and the undriven channel will reproduce that as a crosstalk signal.

Try different headphones to see if the problem persists with a different design.

[MarkOne]

I notice one of the options for that Astro headset is their MixAmp pro controller/USB sound card. Are you using that or just the headphones on their own?

The reason I ask is the info on their website says it supports Dolby Audio which:

Dolby® Audio delivers cinematic, 3D gaming audio experience, and broadcasts Dolby® out to streaming audiences.

I'm not sure what that actually means for the headset but it implies to me there is some image processing going on that might feed some left or right to the other ear.

[Wonks]

There is a closed back conversion kit for those otherwise open-backed headphones. No idea of the cost but it may be worth trying, but I'd first just try and borrow some closed-back headphones to see if you get the full 'only one ear' experience.

With open backed headphones, some of the sound (but really not a lot at all) will leak into the other ear. The actual amount will depend of the headphone design. But the more you listen for it, the more you'll hear it.