> To me, passing the fixed orientation forward (i.e. picking the normal
> orienation on G) is better in the sense that it's the implementation of a
> scalar beamformer, whereas picking the normal orientation on W is
> calculating a vector beamformer and only then selecting the normal
> component.

i agree that with pick_ori='normal' you discard 2/3 of the data but that's
what we do with minimum_norm and I'd like this to be same at least
if it's called pick_ori='normal'

> The max-power implementation is now also a scalar beamformer
> (i.e. in line 162 there is no need to invert Ck because it's just a scalar),
> only the forward operator is limited to a single orientation later on in the
> code when it's already included in Wk (line 153) and Ck (line 154). So if we
> do normal orientation picking we l ose comp atibility with how max-power is
> calculated and it's no longer a scalar beamformer even though we're fixing
> source orientation. WDYT?

no problem on that side. Look at the minimum_norm code to understand.

> I skimmed over this issue (sorry!), but in hindsight it does seem
> important, maybe it's best to investigate it more deeply, i.e. check what
> exactly causes the normal orientation to give bigger results - is it really
> meaningful, occuring where the solutions have large values... or rather only
> for small values, which would suggest, I guess, numerical issues. I'll try
> to quickly look into this.

it's mostly important for consistency across the code base.