SurroundByUs.com

@ Muziekschuur

I sympathise with the feelings you shared about surround music and I was very surprised nobody reacted on some of your remarks.
I see it this way :

Sound from behind you is unrealistic and completely made up, completely artificial.
I have never seen a band playing and hearing one of the instruments coming from left or right behind me > everything was in front !
I did hear some reverb from the rear, but that was all, nothing more.
It's the effort of the mixers and producers to give more depth to stereo sound with added gimmicks. I think we all know that
3/4 of the stereo CD's can never be played live on stage in the same way as recorded in the studio.
5.1 makes that even worse.
And this goes for spam conversions, but also for retail and professional mixed in the studio.
The major problem is this : when I listen to stereo on my HTS it doesn't sound good, at least worse than it sounded when I still had a dedicated stereo system.
And all those hardware tricks (Prologic I and II, Neo 6, SRS TruSurround, etc, etc.) do improve the spreading over 5 speakers a bit, but the same on every song and thus it gets boring after a while. Here lies the biggest challenge : to use your stereo sound over the 5 speakers in a way that doesn't mess up the original intention of the original mixer/producer. And that's where your remark about the Soundfiled microphone came in. The methods published here can give an excellent separation, can give an excellent sounding surround, but never anything equal to what was recorded with a Soundfield microphone. The only methods that can do THAT, are Ambisonics methods, which keep up with the stereo mixer's intention.
For some excellent soundfield methods, there are other places online like : http://www.dtsac3.com

The debate on two versus six channels, "listening as if the band is in front of you" versus "listening as if you're in the middle of the mix," etc., is an incredibly old one and one that's been chronicled many times over on the internet, just like the "retail surround" versus "quad transfer" versus "upmixed surround" argument. At this point, I've learned that it's a matter of personal preference and that we learn best when we take a look at what each other is doing. A lot of people who have joined up here came from other forums in which I know there a lot of people who believe that upmixing is a waste of time (a lot of that has more to do with bad upmixers, though, than with anything else. ) They're here, though, and I think they're learning a bit, just like my listening to more quad transfers and retail 5.1s teaches me a bit something as to what I want to do, as well as why they feel the way they do. I also think it's wonderful that the original poster here has hung in there with the thread and has not shook his head and walked away. Musikschuur, I'm sure, will learn something from his experience here as well.

There are very good things that several of the soundfield methods on the forum recommended above, especially with some of your sparser sources in which there's just not enough music to achieve good separation, and I have no problem saying that at all. Many of us initially learned through some of those methods, and the internet is more than big enough to handle everyone's methods. I also would recommend utilizing ArcTan in that same manner, as I think the results you can achieve with it, and the amount of control you have over your output, are just stellar.

I don't want to get ahead of myself for newbies here who are hearing about "ArcTan" and not potentially finding it here. ArcTan is one of the drop-down selection options within SPEC. If testing it out is peaking your interest, all you have to do is work with the SPEC layout. Yet another of the beauties of this method....