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Once you have a stereo recording, trying to 'unbake the cake' and change the balance of the centre vs the sides (etc) always leads to some kind of downside. In essence it's not unlike the hoary old chestnut of "vocal removal" which used to be the holy grail sought endlessly and tediously on internet discussion forums. One of the more sophisticated tools to attempt this kind of thing is part of Adobe Audition 3.0 (and possibly similar methods have been provided by others) - they call it the "Centre Channel Extractor" and it uses far more sophisticated techniques than hitherto, but with new downsides (depending on the content of the recording) eg phasiness and swishing in the result.
But Audition goes even further with its displays of phase and pan. In these you can highlight any spatial area (not just the centre) and then process the highlighted area, either simply changing its level, or applying a slew of effects in a chain.
When demoing Audition to students, I do a "party trick" which is to take a Norah Jones song - with typically a clear dry vocal in the centre - and with a few keystrokes in the pan display, drop the level of the vocal and add a largish reverb, to make it quite different from the original. Gets cries of ooh and ahh every time.
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