SurroundByUs.com

The SurroundByUs Newsletter
Issue #1 Fall 2009

In this issue:

• Welcome!
• About SPEC
• Member Feedback


WELCOME!!! We want to thank everyone who has taken the time to register, look around the site, contributed questions, and given a listen to our conversions from fair use and Creative Commons sources. We are incredibly pleased with the diversity of those who have discovered SBU thus far, with as many members joining us from other great audiophile sites such as Quadraphonic Quad, AVS Forum, and Doom9 to those who stumbled upon us through Google, Bing and Yahoo. Special thanks as well to net bigwigs like Jon from QQ and David V from Plogue for their positive words as to our site.

The SBU newsletter will be published four times a year in order to provide a one-stop read as to new surround developments for all members, as well as in order to provide updates to those members who may not visit us on a regular basis. We hope you find it informative, and are open to feedback as to how we can make it a useful document.

About SPEC

If you have not taken the opportunity to take a closer look at the SPEC method, please do. Along with our surround Wiki, SPEC is the centerpiece of SurroundByUs, and what we hope will grow into the premiere upmixing method available on the internet.

While the “Your First Conversion” guide points you towards the “SLICE” option in SPEC, the other options within SPEC provide for much variety in soundfield and separation, with tweaking possibilities which will give you very good sound quality for the grand majority of sources. Try sparser music with the “LCR” option, or some vocal-driven rock ‘n roll with “ArcTan” with blended SLICE rears.

I don’t know what is more impressive about SPEC, whether it is the level of sound quality achieved without any commercial VSTs, or that the developer of SPEC, Zeerround, had only worked with Plogue Bidule for about three months before coming up with it!

Member Feedback

Your feedback is very important to us, and we are actively seeking it out. We look for this site to be as user-friendly and informative as possible. We want it to be somewhere more than where you occasionally check in as to how to author a DVD-A, and would like it to be somewhere where discussion is always occurring. Without your input, we cannot do that.

Consider the following and, please, by all means, let us know, whether by forum post or private message, what you think!

• How did you find us?
• Where else do you feel we could promote our site?
• Are you able to easily find the surround Wiki? How can we make it more visible to guests and new members?
• What would you like to see added to the surround Wiki?
• Are you able to find SPEC easily?
• Are the SPEC guide, and the guide to “Your First Conversion” clear?
• How accessible are the CC-licensed torrents? Is this the preferred method of music delivery?
• Would you rather see entire albums, or individual tracks, uploaded?
• What could be done to make you want to visit us regularly more?

Other than these questions, any other feedback is welcome and needed!


See you again sometime this winter with a further update on methods, active forum threads, downloads, and wherever else this forum takes us.

River161 @ SurroundByUs

The SurroundByUs Newsletter is published minimum once seasonably and distributed via forum post and email to all subscribed members at www.surroundbyus.com.