Surround Sound Explained

Surround sound in one form or another has been a part of the film industry for many years, but the emergence of affordable digital technology has now pushed it into the domestic mainstream. Hugh Robjohns begins SOS's definitive guide to surround and its implications for the hi-tech musician.

Hugh Robjohns continues SOS's series on surround sound with a detailed look at Dolby Pro Logic, the widely used surround system originally developed for use in the cinema, and considers how you might adapt your home recording setup to allow mixing in this format.

Though a commercial failure in the 1970s, the Ambisonics surround sound system was technically flawless, and survives to...

SOS's guide to the world of surround sound comes right up to date with the first of two looks at the modern 5.1 standard, and its use with DVD Video and DVD Audio discs.

There's a lot more to 5.1 surround sound production than stereo with extra channels — new, bewildering terms and concepts abound. This month, we explain Metadata, Upmixing, Downmixing, and look at what that centre speaker actually does...

Our series turns to the practicalities of setting up your own surround-capable recording system, and we talk to two radically different surround studios to see how they've coped — one at project- and one at pro-studio level.

We consider some of the pros and cons of mixing in surround, and hear how experienced surround producers take advantage of the format, and tackle the problems.

We hear from more surround producers working at very different ends of the music business to see how they've created working surround systems, and how they make use of 5.1 at the mixing stage.

In this final part of our series, we look at how the major project studio-oriented MIDI + Audio sequencers (DAWs) currently handle surround.