Choosing the Best Sound Format for Production

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Choosing the Best Sound Format for Production

There are many issues facing an audio professional who is considering getting into surround production, either for music, film, DVD, Internet, or multi-media. Whether you are recording, mixing, editing, or mastering, there is a lot of information that you need to be comfortable with before you can succeed in surround sound. Although this collection is a good start, it is by no means an exhaustive list or in-depth manual. Hopefully it will give you a well-rounded introduction and good foundation on which to build the pursuit of your goals.

There are a number of critical issues that seem to surface every time we talk about the evolution of stereo into surround sound. Not unlike the evolution of mono into stereo, the finer points of mixing, panning, bass management, speaker placement, movie theater Vs home theater, disc formats and the alphabet soup of formats themselves, from THX to DTS to Dolby to LFE, to SACD to DVD, to DVD-A and so on, became the critical issue of the day.

Speaker placement is another hot topic. Starting with the ITU suggested specifications of stereo placement.

ITU: International Telecommunications Union. In surround sound, the ITU spec is referred to when talking about setting up speakers for 5.1. The ITU's guidelines are widely used and a very good place to start. To briefly summarize, they state that all speakers should be an equal distance from the listening position, with the center straight ahead, the Left and Right 30 degrees out forming a 60 degree arc across the front, and the surrounds at roughly 110 degrees. While on the subject of setting up your speakers, there are guideline...

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.... It also supports a 754kbps rate for DVD. In the theater, it is actually encoded onto a CD that plays back in sync with the film and is decoded into a very high quality 5.1 soundtrack. Its debut was with the release of Jurassic Park. The third thing that you need to know about DTS is that they have a large catalog of music CDs that play back on regular CD players with digital outs. When the digital output is

fed into a DTS decoder, of which several DTS equipped consumer receivers and processors exist, you get a high quality 5.1 music format. Many people don't realize that there is a viable 5.1 music format available today with a catalog of a couple hundred popular CDs available.

DTS-ES: This version of DTS is a 6.1 system with a center rear channel, similar to Dolby-EX.

Bibliography:

Www.sospubs.co.uk

www.audioxpress.com/reviews.

www.itu.int

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