That's a pretty broad pair of questions! There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of posts here on these topics...
I would suggest reading the Michael Williams Stereophonic Zoom
paper; that's a good place to start. It may also be helpful to look at some of the related visualization tools, such as this one from
Sengpiel (there are others).
As that may be a little technical as a starting point, I would also suggest poking around the articles in the Mic University section on DPA's website.