Setting pan depth in Pro Tools

So I wanted to take a moment to discuss pan depth in Pro Tools. Since Pro Tools…9, we can actually set the Pro Tools mixers pan depth, or pan law, as a variable…setting, and I want to explain to you what that means and how that can affect…your mixing process.…First of all, let's just kind of see what's going on here with pan depth in…the Pro Tools mixer.…I've created a session that's made up of a simple sine wave on a mono track,…and I have a master fader with the Phase Scope so that I can do some basic metering here.…

So if I play this back, we can see that that signal at -10 is actually summing…lower on the Master Fader.…Now if I pan that signal, you see how it grows there to that -10 value, or hard…right, grows to that negative -10, but when panned dead center the volume is…actually being reduced.…

Why is this?…Well when something is just coming out of the left speaker or just coming out of…the right speaker, we are going to perceive that as a different level then when…it's being fed out both speakers and we're able to hear the sound come out…