Members nerol1st Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 I think our problem is we see surround as an extension of stereo so it doesn't really impress, but I know there are kids today who are mixing their home recordings in surround where the kick is dead center of the room, the snare in the rear speakers, the guitars in front and the singers on the sides. They have no preconceived ideas about placement and are having a ball playing with it.That is so accurate it's scary. Well thats the idea I get with studio stuff. I think it would sound weird if you were doing 5.1 for a live concert like that Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 17, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 When I was a little kid, I loved music. And, like I said, I was blown away when I first heard stereo. I had to have it. When the first portable stereo (an RCA, changer, no radio2) showed up in the Blue Chip trading stamp catalog, I began a long and dogged campaign to save them up toward one.When we finally got it... it was cool for about 20 minutes. The fact that the speakers were built into the little portable cabinet, about 18" apart -- and were those awful little 2.5" x 5" speakers they used to put in portable TVs -- and it had three knobs -- a left volume, a right volume and a tone control that went from muddy to tinny but nothing happy in between -- that and the fact that my old man would not let me saw it apart -- I even drew plans for precisely how I'd do it -- I was 9 or 10 -- drove me to vow to make my own stereo. I'd got done building some walkie talkies from Allied Radio kits and I was ready to tackle something meaningful... Anyhow... that started my audiophile period (I loved that self-descriptive -- it really set me apart from the other jr hi kids... like I needed to be any farther apart)... I became obsessed with improving my funky stereo and really identified with other "hi fi bugs." If I found out someone had a good component stereo I attached myself to them like a limpet. I hung out most afternoons after school and often all day in the summer at the local component shop. Giving advice to adults when the owner was otherwise distracted and likely driving away plenty of biz. It was during that period that I first heard the term, monomaniac. I heard it a lot.Someplace along the way, when I was obsessing over the latest test records and sound FX discs and rejecting favorite old albums because they were mono or lo fi... I started realizing I'd lost sight of why I got a stereo in the first place: to listen to music.So -- I can really identify with your old man and brother thrilling to the subsonic throb of those chopper blades... (And you might be surprised at just how many times I've heard about the sound of those chopper blades from people talking first about the movie in the theatre and then about how cool their home theatres theatres were.)Anyhow, I don't mind having halfway (better make that 1/8 way) decent sound attached to my (27" CRT) TV in the form of my funky, plastic Cambridge 2.1 system -- the sound on the built in speakers is pretty sucky and muffled -- not what aging punk rockers are looking for when they're watching movies or TV with overlapping dialog -- but the sub's discreetly balanced in and the left and right are essentially at the edges of the screen (no room to flank it so I popped them on top like little white, square, mickey mouse ears -- easier to hear throughout the room, too, with them at ear level). Man, blue, you must've been a very smart boy to have even GROKKED why stereo was important, impressive and a step up from mono! I'll bet you had the same test album we did: the one where the genial man walks you through the "phantom middle speaker" concept, replete with a ping-pong game, a car driving past, a jet taking off, etc. Then a mambo piece where the saxophonist inhabits the "phantom third speaker"...?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 I can imagine that mix -- but I can't imagine any way I would ever like it. With regard to the surround/movie thing... it may simply be sort of a generational thing. BTW, I may not have mentioned it but I actually had a 4.1 setup hooked to my first DVD player... It was not high quality or set up properly -- or in anything whatsoever close to the appropriate physical environment. I guess I had that set up for 3 or 4 years, maybe. I watched a fair number of movies on it (not all of them surround movies, though, by any means). You know I just thought of something -- provoked, no doubt by how moved I was at reading my own account of my monomaniacal adolescence. When I was a kid, after we got our first color TV (the second on the block, yo) I would watch the crappiest imaginable color movie over anything in black and white. I'd watch a horribly dubbed Turkish-Italian joint production spy movie with no continuity, all the voices by two people, and even crappy, washed out, ochre-color -- even though on the next channel over was Citizen Kane or King Kong or classic Hitchcock. When I started turning hippie at 17, I just pretty much turned everything on its head... I started watching old, black and white movies, stopped listening to test records and Command Performance exotica and started listening to weird rock and roll. (Well, it seemed weird at the time -- and some of it really was... that first United States of America album was pretty interesting and it's only now that anyone knows who Silver Apples was/were... hell, even I didn't realize how hip they were at the time. I'm listening to the Contact album which I have on vinyl someplace and, having just finisehed listening to Can's Flow Motion, the continuity is really striking, I gotta say.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 17, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 My personal feeling is: bah! humbug to recreating a "live concert experience" with surround... To me the coolest thing would be electronic music--- which, by its very nature is not expected to sound "natural" in any way. Bizarre pannings and improbable sonic placements seem like fun to me. Is there any Surround album available along these lines (ie., totally fantastical and bizarre in its use of the technology) ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 17, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 and it's only now that anyone knows who Silver Apples was/were... hell, even I didn't realize how hip they were at the time. I'm listening to the Contact album which I have on vinyl someplace and, having just finisehed listening to Can's Flow Motion, the continuity is really striking, I gotta say.) Silver Apples... very kewl... very weird. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 My personal feeling is: bah! humbug to recreating a "live concert experience" with surround... To me the coolest thing would be electronic music--- which, by its very nature is not expected to sound "natural" in any way. Bizarre pannings and improbable sonic placements seem like fun to me. Is there any Surround album available along these lines (ie., totally fantastical and bizarre in its use of the technology) ? I think it would be brilliant to recreate the experience of sitting in the concert hall at the symphony... all the smokers waiting til the quiet parts to hack away, the rustling and shuffling... the grumpy old guy who never applauds muttering to his wife... And why not recreate the experience I had of seeing Public Image Ltd at the Olympic theatre -- a boxing arena with hideous acoustics -- and some jiveazz poseur punk wannabe yelling in my ear the whole show, "Johnny Rotten, you ------- sellout, loser!" And then turning to me at the end and saying, "Man, I love that guy." I wanna capture that... Anyhow... I do think the environmental electronica thing does sound interesting. As someone who actually owned a couple Mystic Moods Orchestra LPs, and thrilled to the fake bird calls of Arthur Lyman's Taboo, I'm not completely beyond the charms of a little gentle rain or some discreet crickets chirping in the background -- I could easily imagine that being kind of cool in total immersion surround... Then again, a real hippie would just go live in the country where he could listen to real rain and real crickets... Hmmm... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members slight-return Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 I guess neither here nor there, but I dig me some binaural I first started digging on it for audiodrama, but try to grab binaural music when I can find it Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members the stranger Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members doug osborne Posted June 17, 2008 Members Share Posted June 17, 2008 ...Bizarre pannings and improbable sonic placements seem like fun to me. Is there any Surround album available along these lines (ie., totally fantastical and bizarre in its use of the technology) ? The DVD-A of Insane Clown Posse The Wraith: Shangri-La, Flaming Lips Yoshimi..., BT's Monster are good examples of extreme 5.1 mixes. (aformentioned) Pink Floyd DSOTM, Beck Sea Change, and Beatles LOVE are examples of less-crazy mixes that will make any of you throw away the 2-channel version. --- A convincing mono image can never be produced with any array of speakers but a single speaker. The phantom image produced by two speakers is fatally flawed with time and frequency response issues. A 5.1, or at least an LCR mix, is the minimum necessary to provide a realistically solid sterophonic image. --- A single singer or instrumentalist is not a mono source, even from close-up, unless they are playing in an anechoic space (and that would just plain hurt). The stereophonic image comes from the total sonic experience of the player and the room (and the listener), and probably can often be better reproduced by one speaker than two, and by five better than two. --- A 5.1 system is a tool that can deliver a realistic sonic image from mono to surround - a two-channel system has to fight every way of the game to do this because of the inadequacy and coloration of the phantom. --- Yes, binaural is a great sterophonic system. It has nothing to do with surround. --- The advent of home theater in the '80s with the first home Dolby Surround decoders was a great time for home music system setup. This was adopted nearly ten times faster than Quad for many reasons (one distribution system, and it was backwards compatible). Previously, most two-speaker systems were placed wrong in all but the coolest of audiophile bachelor pads. The center channel's existence was the greatest boon to stereo to-date. Locking the center image in one place frees the listeners to sit in more places - with phantom center, there is one limited location to sit if the listener wants to hear anything resembling an accurate phantom image. 5.1 frees that, and allows for more compromises in the placement of the other speakers without hurting the stereophonic experience. If every music mix was done in surround with 2-channel and mono compatibility, it can be delivered through digital television, digital radio, many disc formats, iPods (Dolby Headphone), adapting its way down to the lowest common denominator systems. Any system can benefit if the original mix is done for 5.1 distribution. Money is to be made by musicians if their music is availble in 5.1 mixes (commercial, TV, film use...). Yes, in real life, sound doesn't just come from two places in front of us, and our music delivery shouldn't, either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 18, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 What do you make of Phil Spector who doggedly embraced mono well into the stereo (and post-stereo) eras... He apparently threw a wall-eyed fit, circa 1990, when someone suggested he should re-release all the Ronettes and Crystals tracks in stereo... There was something about mono he really dug... And that his records have lasted so long and still sound damned great (I listened to The Ronettes singing "Baby, I Love You" today, and, I swear, it still is one of the greatest pop singles ever made!) must mean something (though i'm not sure what). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rudolf von Hagenwil Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 ... a two-channel system has to fight every way of the game to do this because of the inadequacy and coloration of the phantom... of the opera. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 18, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 Anyhow... I do think the environmental electronica thing does sound interesting. As someone who actually owned a couple Mystic Moods Orchestra LPs, and thrilled to the fake bird calls of Arthur Lyman's Taboo, I'm not completely beyond the charms of a little gentle rain or some discreet crickets chirping in the background ... Ha-ha-ha, blue, i had those same albums! there was one Mystic Moods album which featured, IIRC, a "Be-In" in Central Park's Sheep's Meadow recorded circa 1969? All these hippies dancing around (in glorious stereophonic, of course) striking tambourines and tooting on panflutes, singing, "Legalize mah-ree-wah-nah! Legalize mah-ree-wah-nah!" to a kind of Myxolydian Mambo beat.... I was never sure what the pubescent listener in suburbia (moi) was supposed to...uh...do along with that recording....? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 That's hilarious... by 1969, though, I was one of those hippies (although not in Central Park). On a lark in the late 90s, I picked up a Mystic Moods Orchestra CD originally recorded in '68 (I think) and it was all pretty much what I expected -- until I got to one instrumental (not sure if it was a cover of a hit or filler, I need to dig that CD out) and -- holy crap -- it used that breakbeat all the way through. I had to check the album to make sure it wasn't a remix (but nothing else stood out in any sort of anachronistic way). It was a sound, of course, that we're all sick to death of now (but how can we miss it when it won't go away?) but back then the familiar two bar syncopation was just a not-that-frequently-used drum fill... to hear it all the way through a song... wild. Breakbeat, laid back instrumenation, ambient sounds... Maybe Mystic Moods Orchestra was a lot hipper than anyone ever gave them credit for...? Nah... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Hard Truth Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 rasputin1963: Bizarre pannings and improbable sonic placements seem like fun to me. Is there any Surround album available along these lines (ie., totally fantastical and bizarre in its use of the technology) ? Tabla Beat Science-Live at fillmore DVD (even though its a live performance it has some wacky surround panning)BT-This Binary Universe Meat Beat Manifesto - In Dub 5.1 Surround Tino Vision (2005)Paul Oakenfold - A Voyage into Trance (inclueds glasses for 3D viewing)Amon Tobin-Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 Soundtrack (DVD-audio) The Meat Beat and Tino vision are probably the wildest mixes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Bruce Swedien Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 I'm curious.... Are any of you doing music in Surround (ie., 5.1 or higher)?I've never worked in Surround. It would seem to me-- I could be wrong--- that mixing music in Surround involves a whole new way of thinking.... It would seem to have different goals and different modus operandi... possibly more problems attached to it as well...Do you: try to make the music sound "natural", ie., make the listener feel as if he were "there" (wherever "there" happens to be)?...or do you use the extra speakers to create really novel, exciting or even disconcerting sound location effects, with a kind of "sky's the limit" attitude?what's MOST different or MOST challenging about doing music in Surround?Conversely, does it possibly "free you up" or make certain things easier rather than more difficult than in stereo?Do note that I'm referring to music in Surround.... not cinema soundtracks, because cinema is a different kettle of fish.All comments and reflections welcome... NO!!!! Bruce Swedien Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 I take that to be a resounding "no," Bruce. Let me ask you this -- since you're someone who had his hands on the faders at the time when stereo was just starting to be an issue -- I see AllMusic lists your first credit in 1959... How did you feel about the advent of stereo? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jeff da Weasel Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 NO!!!!Yay Bruce! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members doug osborne Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 of the opera. You've unmasked me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members doug osborne Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 What do you make of Phil Spector who doggedly embraced mono well into the stereo (and post-stereo) eras... He recorded and mixed with one speaker. Working in Mono on a 2-channel system will not do the same thing (unless you turn off one of the speakers, something the consumer probably won't do). A 5.1 system can (use C). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members rasputin1963 Posted June 18, 2008 Author Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 He recorded and mixed with one speaker. Working in Mono on a 2-channel system will not do the same thing (unless you turn off one of the speakers, something the consumer probably won't do). A 5.1 system can (use C). I see. At first, Spector was probably responding well to the commercial realities of his consumership: most homes in the early 1960's were listening to AM monophonic radio and playback through monophonic hardware. But Spector clung to his devotion to mono into the 1990's, during which time nearly every American was listening to music played back in stereo... There must've been an aspect of his "wall of sound" which worked perfectly in mono, but whose effect was compromised in stereo... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rudolf von Hagenwil Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 Are any of you doing MUSIC in Surround? Yes, but I don't like to talk about it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ryan7585 Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 I haven't read the other posts, but I'll say this. Surround is an untapped art. Absolutely mind-blowing experiences could be created with it. Given a standard delivery format and listening environment, it wouldn't be too hard to distribute either. Just start some IMAX-style listening theatres for surround music. like a chair suspended inside a globe of speakers. In my opinion, humanity has yet to experience a true auditory masterpiece. Until we fully exploit the possibilities of surround, it'll never happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jeff da Weasel Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 In my opinion, humanity has yet to experience a true auditory masterpiece. Never been to a symphonic orchestra at a nice venue, I take it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rudolf von Hagenwil Posted June 18, 2008 Members Share Posted June 18, 2008 ... just sit into the middle of the orchestra and there you have your ultimate surround Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Jeff da Weasel Posted June 19, 2008 Members Share Posted June 19, 2008 Best seat in the house, unless you're a second fiddle like I was. I NEED MORE HARP! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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