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 guidelines for reference levels as well. Although there is a small room spec that calls for a 79db reference, the most common is 85db for all 5 main speakers, and 89db for the subwoofer. Some Dolby certified film stages alter this slightly and reference the surrounds to 82db. You would use pink noise and measure using C weightin...
