well, good question. what do we do now? we either wear headphones, which we seem to agree can get the whole aural spectrum recreation thing done alright, or we say fuck it and listen to stereo speakers. 5.1 sounds cool. i don't really think we need a cottage industry for it, making bad home kits and such. it's the type of thing that in the hands of the average consumer will probably be misused, which is o.k. i guess.

but why dont we just not mixdown at all as engineers? labels could start selling the multitracks direct to the customer and let him/her mix the albums they buy on his/her own channel mixers to his/her tastes. kind of like eq functions on stereos. i remember being a kid and wishing i could control those things at home. it might be cool, for the music lovers, although i think most people don't need that much control or that many channels. like others have said, they'll misconfigure them or make the sub-woofer go nuts, like in every home/car system i know of that HAS a subwoofer.

i smell a cash grab. quad was cool. so is 5.1, but not what it's being made for.

El Protoolio wrote:Fair enough, but if you're not going to be too extreme with your panning in order to have a good mix that translates well as you move around the room, then the advantage seems to me to be minscule and not really worth it. In other words, it seems like only a 10% improvement or something like that.

A good 5.1 mix does sound pretty impressive, even with just minor changes from the stereo mix. The change from 1-D to 2-D is pretty amazing. But I agree, it's probably not really worth it to re-mix most old stereo mixes.

-b

Rodabod wrote:One thing I was wondering was, if you were closer to a particular speaker, say sitting near a rear speaker, would this not distort the distance information?

Of course, if you're right up against a speaker that's part of an array (stereo or 5.1) you're not going to get the full effect that the array is presenting.

In some ways, I like the sound of a surround mix for the reasons you described, but I have a feeling it will not translate brilliantly onto consumer systems, especially in rooms with a poor acoustic.

Well, what about listening to stereo mixes on super crappy boom-boxes and car stereos? Same thing. A good stero or 5.1 mix will translate fairly well to bad playback equipment and environments.

Bob Weston wrote:Well, what about listening to stereo mixes on super crappy boom-boxes and car stereos? Same thing.

A good stero or 5.1 mix will translate fairly well to bad playback equipment and environments.

I agree. My point was that poor quality surround systems can sound absolutely hideous, whereas similarly priced budget hifi would generally have better fidelity.

Speaker positioning looks to be more complicated as well with surround and will probably suffer worse consequences when paired with a poor acoustic - ie. room reflections, bass nodes, etc.

But as you say, a good 5.1 mix will sound great on a good 5.1 setup just as a stereo equivalent would.

I'm looking forward to listening to surround mixes in the future. In particular, I think ambience / reverb might be quite exciting to experience with the extra dimension.

stephensolo wrote:we studied some 5.1 at the old college. my conclusion was this:

we hear in stereo, right?

Wrong.

When you close your eyes, can't you tell how far a sound is away from you? Can't you tell when a plane flies overhead that it's in front of you, then above you, then behind you? If you heard in stereo, the plane would always be at the same point in that one-dimensional stereo picture.

So how do we hear in 3-dimensions when our 2 ears are in 1-dimension?

L-R
We can tell a sound source's position on the l-r plane via ITD and IAD:Inter-aural Amplitude Difference means that the sound shows up at a different volume level at each ear. If it's louder in the left ear than the right, the sound is coming more from the left. Inter-aural Time Difference means that the sound gets to one ear before it gets to the other. If a sound gets to the left ear before the right, it's coming more from the left side. Your brain uses a combination of ITD and IAD to locate sound sources on the L-R plane.

Front - Back
How close to you is the sound source? If you're inside a room, you get help from the room acoustics, reflections, ratio of direct to reflected sound that you hear. Stuff like that. How about when you're outside? A combination of volume and timbre I think. You can tell by the timbre of a known sound how loud it should be at a given distance. I know what my wife's voice sounds like (the timbre) when she is talking. If it's really loud, it doesn't make me think she's yelling. It makes me think that she's very close to me. If the timbre of her voice sounds like she's yelling, but the volume is very low (like a whisper), I don't think she's whispering. I think she's yelling from far away.

Vertical
We locate sounds in the vertical axis due to something called the Pinna Response. The Pinna is the part of your ear that's outside your head. Sounds bounce around on that thing before they enter your ear. Depending upon how high or low they are in relation to you, they will bounce off different parts of the Pinnnae and you brain can decode that added information. That's how you can tell as the plane flies over your head.

Also, we all know about your Doppler shift.

i mean, i think that's why stereo caught on and stayed with us, because really, most of the time stereo employment is irrelevant.

I think it caught on because it sounds better than mono. It was the first step: 0-dimensional sound up to 1-dimensional sound. If you're in the next room, you're hearing the stereo folded down to mono. When we mix records in stereo it's always important to check for that mono-compatibility.

2-dimensional sound (or surround / 5.1) sounds even better. It's not a necessity. But it does sound great. And we still need to make sure that when you're not in the "sweet spot" the mix still works. And when you're in the next room and the 5 speakers are essentially summed to mono for you, that still works. Mono-compatibility

but headphones, two ears = two sources. it makes sense. surround needs to Surround you.

Headphones = binaural, not stereo. When you listen to a 2-speaker array, both ears hear both speakers. With headphones, each channel only goes to one ear. These are two very different experiences.

Weston, what did you mean about this not necessarily being the case? any aural experience you have in 5.1 surround mix would be reproducible with headphones on the stereo plane i would think, it would HAVE to be. there simply is nothing that cant be expressed into headphoness (two ears, two sources) that we can hear.

Firstly, my name is Bob.

Secondly, you're right. You can simulate a 5.1 mix for a pair of headphones. It would be a binaural mix specifically tailored to emulate a 5.1 mix in a room. But it would not be anything like a stereo mix or a 5.1 mix.



You locate sound sources in a surround mix by having that same sound go to all the speakers at different volumes and/or at different times. So, like I said before, you can simulate a band playing in-between you and the front speakers. You cannot do this with a stereo array. You can, with difficulty, do it with a binaural headphone mix.

Bob

Bob Weston wrote:You locate sound sources in a surround mix by having that same sound go to all the speakers at different volumes and/or at different times. So, like I said before, you can simulate a band playing in-between you and the front speakers. You cannot do this with a stereo array. You can, with difficulty, do it with a binaural headphone mix.

Bob

so what you're saying is, it is MORE difficult to simulate a surround mix in headphones than it is to do it with surround sound. no kidding - one method requires five-plus channels while the other requires two. one method allows for speakers to be placed anywhere in a 3 dimensional space while the other does not.

you're also saying the dolby system sounds better - i imagine it would. i imagine 16 or 24 channels utilized with speakers placed in a room at the exact location of the various intruments used in the original performance all in relation to each other would sound better still. is that a logical next step in consumer audio reproduction? there are already 6.1 and 7.1 versions out there; i doubt it will stop at that.

im not hating on mutli-channel sound reproduction. but to say it's good because it sounds better is akin to say a porsche is good because it drives better than a honda. of course it is; and there's a market for that, in both cases, to the enthusiasts with the cash to burn.

but now imagine that porsche as being much, MUCH more difficult to drive than the honda, requiring a technical and mechanical know-how that nearly none if its owners possessed in order to properly drive it.

i'm nervous setting up two monitors in a control room with all the varibles that can negatively affect the sound picture, nevermind 5 plus. imagine if i had NO experience whatsoever with speaker placement, like the average consumer. i'd be throwing those things all over the room, kind of how people do right now. and those systems sound like shit. and the mixes are off. hell, even the test mixes in those plush rooms at the 5.1 demo rooms are off. and the people dont know it, and even if they did, they can't fix it, because it's too comlicated. the guys who recorded, and mixed, and mastered that music, along with the guys who built the components ought to have put together something more user friendly, like a two channel mix and a stereo on which to play it.

you know what, i started off as devil's advocate with this, but bob, you have helped me realize it: i'm anti 5.1!

Yeah. I guess you're right. It's difficult, so let's not try.

-b

touche.

Well..... This thread has not really answered the whole question of "to surround or not to surround", but there is obviously no definitive answer.

I think Bob has given an good interpretation of surround's capabilities and a few of us have expressed our paranoia towards potential pitfalls.

I'm looking forward to hearing a surround mix on a good setup. At the end of the day, consumers are always left to deal with playing back their music themselves, so you can't hold yourself fully responsible for them.

As with most new technologies, some people are always going to go against them. The same happened when stereo was unleashed, infact, there are still people out there who argue that we should still be listening to mono.

Honestly I don't care if people nowadays want to mix in surround or not, that's their choice. My issue is remixing records that were originally made for listening on 2 channels just to make a few more bucks.

True sterophonic sound would be coming from all around you. We hear the natural world in stereo. Our 2 channel hi fi systems are "simulated" stereo.

However, just to be more of a Devil's Advocate, what about Quad? Why didn't that take off? Isn't that a similar playback setup to 5.1? I'm too young to remember it being around but I remember hearing about it and how it went the way of the 8 track. Isn't 5.1 the new Quad? And isn't the Mini Cooper the new Black?