Stereo Widening

[Farview]

Why then do so many mastering engineers use it? Why is it usually included with mastering plugins and finalizers?.

A lot of times mastering engineers use them to colapse the stereo image a bit. To make the mix not so wide. Stereo widening plugins (or hardware) are useful but can easily be taken too far.

Also, what is the difference between widening and what I described earlier about doubling a track? All I did was send a delayed portion of the track to the other speaker.

Widening is when you take a stereo signal and change the apparent width by changing the relationship between the mid (mono) and the side information. If you take a widener and put it at it's extreme setting, anything that was panned to the center would disappear and the left and right signal would be out of phase with each other. If you go to the extreme the other way, you get mono.
What you were doing is adding a delay that created stereo. In order to use a widener, you need a stereo signal to begin with.

 

[jamtheguitarman]

has anybody got windows media player 9 i think. it has a thing called WOW or something. it sais its a sterio widener. try playing around with it.

 

[masteringhouse]

Sorry coming in late on this topic (been a busy boy lately).

Just came to backup Farview's comments. There are a few different varieties of stereo enhancement which include comb filtering, delay, phase adjustments and M/S processing. The biggest ill of them is usually how the mix is affected in regards to mono compatibility and phase distortion.