z-Qualizer manual
Z-Systems Audio Engineering
6
Taking advantage of M/S
The most common use of MS equalization is to deal with center channel information
which needs separate EQ than the sides. If you feed a stereo recording into the z-
Qualizer and set the mode to MS Y, Y, the left channel gain control becomes the M
gain (or center gain), and the right channel gain control becomes the S gain (or side
gain). These controls can manipulate the width of the stereo image, while also reduc-
ing the ratio of the mix of center-located instruments to side-located instruments. Try
it. Feed in a good stereo recording with a center-located vocalist. Turn the right knob
to gain and turn the left knob to L. Turn the gain knob counterclockwise until the L
gain is at -95 dB. The vocalist (and all center instruments) should virtually disappear,
and you will be left with a widely separated, out of phase mono representation of the
instruments and stereo vocal reverb. See what happens if you turn down the R gain
instead.
For equalization, you can cheat the frequencies for the M channel up or down sepa-
rately from the S channel to manipulate the recording in creative ways. All the L la-
bels are interpreted as M and the R labels as S. In MS Y, Y mode there is no way to
adjust full channel balance because the L and R gain controls have become M and S
controls, respectively.
The presets (see below) remember the M/S state, so, for example, you can work on
one tune in MS mode and another in stereo mode.
Presets
Loading Presets
Rotate the left knob to the load position. The alphanumeric display will look some-
thing like this:
a=01
load
Rotate the gain knob (which is directly below the a=01 display) to choose the mem-
ory number from 00 to 99 from which to load, memory 00 is a factory default, which
is set to:
MS N, N; 24 bits; all gains and eqs at 0 dB
. Memories 1 through 99 are
user-adjustable. To return the z-Qualizer to flat settings, simply use the following pro-
cedure with preset #00.
Let’s assume we want to load the contents of memory #34. Rotate the gain knob un-
til the alphanumeric display looks like this:
a=34
load
