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Renoise has a 'width' slider in each channel which is basically a two-way panning slider that pans the sound in both directions. I always liked the sound of a wider mix, especially with drums where the hi-hats play a little wider than the rest of my drums. But I wondering is panning useful or does it kill a lot of the sound when I have something with heavy stereo panning played out on a big mono rig? When I listen to a lot of mixes for dancefloor music and check 'em on analyze them in renoise, they all do look pretty narrow.

Yeah I wondered about this a lot too. When I listen to professional mixes it feels like they use a lot of stereo widening but like you said most big systems are mono so I'm not sure what's "right". I usually only use it on the upper frequencies of my mixes but tbh I don't know how good they'd sound on a big system.

Wider stuff is okay for high freq stuff imo.

Yeah that's what I mostly did. Widened hi-hats, bit from some distorted stuff, etc.

Try widening things differently than just using phase or whatever that 'wide' button does. like in logic you can use the sample delay to delay the left or right channel, but then you still have the same info in the left and right just one happens later, so when making mono it can get lost in the mix as the phasing cancels certain things out. so to make stuff wider just use two different sound sources. like for hats use two different hats but one panned hard left and one hard right. or with a bass, synthesise two different synth sounds and pan them to make it a bit wider. it shouldnt cancel out in mono then as they are two different things.

Wouldn't worry about mono systems. Haven't heard a club system that wasn't stereo in ages.

I went into the studio with the engineer when he mastered an e.p. and we had to do a whole new mixdown for the hats on one of my tracks because I had them spread too far they phased out. he said that he preferred using a sample delay and that as long as one side wasn't more than 10ms from the other they would phase out.

width is more important than length im my experience

I didn't think there were a lot of big mono systems left...honestly most people listen on stereo anyway so should it matter that much?

I like panning my drums slightly as if they were a real drum set recorded with mics. So hats a little bit to the right, snare a little less to the right, kick always in the center, etc.

Bass should always be mono, at least as far as I know...and everything else is taste. At least as long as there's no phasing, which is pretty bad.