Despite the slow commercial take-up for music recorded in a surround format, the industry is busy telling us that we need surround mixing facilities if we're to compete in the modern world — even if we're just running a home studio! My take on all this is that while surround might not be quite in the mainstream yet, we ought at least to be putting it through its paces, to see what it can do. After all, several major software sequencer packages now support surround audio mixing, and some of the newer digital mixers boast 5.1 compatibility. Personally, I rather like the idea of surround, because the type of ambient music I cook up at home should work nicely in the all–immersive world of 5.1. However, when you start thinking about how to go about it, you realise that there are certain bits of vital kit that nobody actually makes. For example, you have five active monitors and a subwoofer, all set up on the periphery of a mystic circle, like something out of a Dennis Wheatley novel, but what do you plug them into?

None of the mixers I've seen (at least, none that are aimed at the home studio market) actually cater for surround monitoring, even if they can output a surround mix to a mastering recorder via their bussouts. By surround monitoring, I don't mean anything fancy — just six monitor outputs that can be adjusted in level using the Control Room volume knob on the mixer. If you have a mixer with enough busses and enough aux sends, you can kludge something, but if it doesn't have plenty of busses, and fader-grouping capabilities, you may find you have to adjust several controls at a time, just to turn the level up and down.

At the last AES show, I decided to try to find a solution. When I came across a well-known digital console manufacturer actually demonstrating surround mixing, I thought, "Great — they'll have the answer." And they did. Their monitoring was controlled by a multi-channel level-control box, of much the type I've described, fed from the buss outs of the mixer. Where did they get this vital piece of kit? It turns out that their Italian distributor made it so he could demonstrate the mixer! Fantastic, but is he going to make one for everybody who buys one of their mixers? I think not.

Further searching yielded a couple of professional surround monitoring boxes with all the trimmings, but they cost upwards of £1500 — more than a lot of people pay for the computer that runs their entire studio. What's needed does not require rocket science. It's little more than three stereo faders in a Tupperware box, with a Biro glued across the fader caps so that they all move together! A little balanced electronic buffering would be good too, and a switch to let you play DAT machines and so on through the speakers, but it's not in any way complicated and shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred pounds — less, ideally.

Next, I spoke to the software companies. Their response was that, as you can mix down to 5.1 audio files within the computer, you can use the outputs of any multi-output soundcard or interface to feed the speakers, using the software mixer to control the monitoring level. In most software mixers, you can group the faders so that adjusting one causes all six outputs to change, but could you actually trust a system like that? It's fine when everything is working properly, but what happens when you have one of those crashes that dumps continuous, full-scale digital grot on all the outputs? Would you have time to run around all six active monitors and turn them down or off before their cones met in the middle of your control room? Make no mistake, you need something physical within arm's reach, to turn down all your monitors in an instant if anything untoward happens.

If anybody comes across anything simple and cheap that will do the job, please email me (sos.feedback@soundonsound.com). Otherwise I'll need to make friends with a certain Italian distributor or get out the Superglue and go through my dead Biro collection!

Paul White
Editor