SurroundByUs.com

Hi,

My first post here at SurroundBy US.

Just wanted to point out that true surround begins in the mix. A audio engineer has tracks and pans them in a surround field. Or the spatial information is allready present when a surround (4 microphones or more) array of microphones has been used to capture the image of the sound.

So a stereo to 5.1. conversion will lead to smeared stereo image. And could lead to an unpleasant feeling as it will disturb your balance when listened to for a longer period of time. We all use localisation by ear in order to stand up right. With a stereo to surround conversion type of audio playing we will get problems with standing and locatisation of sources.

There are many true 5.1. mixes out there and there is a surroundmp3 player out there wich can play back simple downloads of original sources on your computer....

http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/EN/bf/amm/ ... /index.jsp

Here you can find everything about it.

With regards,

Muziekschuur

Welcome Muziekschuur,

As the author of SPEC let me suggest that you listen to conversions done by the various SPEC methods before assuming what the results will be.

I'm sure many of our folks will posit that their conversions at times surpass the results archived by Commercial 5.1 releases from multitrack.

I know from hours and hours of listening that SPEC doesn't lead to any ear fatigue in and of itself but I do know what you are talking about with other conversion techniques and when people "over do it" with mastering tools that include aural exciters etc. I've also run into it in using comb filters as a "stereo synthesizer" as a mono pre-processor for mono to surround conversions.

Anyway, please be assured that all feedback is openly welcomed (that's how we improve and get ideas for new methods) so please try some conversions, listen to some done by others, and ask lots of questions.

I'm happy to go into the technical details of SPEC with anyone who is interested, sometimes great ideas come from the non-technical users. For instance we wouldn't have SPEC/SLICE with out ideas and suggestions from Fan51 (you do still claim to be non-technical, right? .

Cheers,
Zeerround

Hello Muziekschuur,

Nice to have you drop in..

I take that you personally are involved with the MP3 Surround Software ??

I have seen the site before but never have listened to it so certainly cannot comment on it's effectiveness

out of curiosity will it work with 16bit/44kHz files or only compressed MP3's?

Main reason I didnt bother is because in doing these conversions, I bought MANY commercial upmix programs - wasted lots of money trying them - today I use only methods developed by Zeerround and others here..

If you are willing to listen to 5.1 music created by say SPEC and you then say that Fraunhofer is on par or better then for sure I'll try it provided I can use it on non compressed standard CD tracks..

This is a case where I believe a look "underneath the hood" of SPEC would be advised for Muziekschuur as well. I could see where, without looking at process, someone would be concerned as to the idea of going from stereo to surround. Luckily, we've moved far beyond that point in the past several years with methods that are able to do more and more with the music. SPEC is, in many ways, the pinnacle of this, as it provides for an incredible amount of flexibility without the use of any commercial VST software.

I second Zeeeround's idea of having you, Muziekschuur, spend some more time here and seeing if you still feel the same way in a few months' time. It can be our own little pre- and post-test experiment.

I do appreciate you taking the time to write, though. We would be nowhere in this world if we could not handle someone putting us under the microscope and welcome it. It's the only way we move forward.

Thank you for your first post, Muziekschuur. There are indeed many possible sources of surround music and hopefully, the field will continue to come up with new technologies like MP3D players.

Many surround enthusiasts come here because there is a severe lack of retail surround material. Most albums, old as new, are simply not available in a surround mix. "Stereo to surround in a box" technologies found in HT receivers and now MP3D players provide minimal control over the end result. To get what we want, we often have no choice but to do it ourselves, hence this site devoted to the best techniques to achieve the best results.

We take great care in all the steps of the process. We start with lossless sources because we know that lossy (MP3) material quickly gets overwhelmed when 2 channels are used to make 5 or 6. We carefully balance each channel's volume in the soundfield, usually on each individual track, because we know that the extraction routines can steer more or less volume to each channel and very specific channel gains must be applied to create a pleasant effect. We spend a lot of time developing very advanced methods to extract and position sounds in the soundfield and provide a lot of control to minimize/eliminate all artifacts. We even create automated routines to minimize the work of performing a multitude of repetitive tasks.

Many members have been doing this for many years. We learned from others and have kept pushing the envelope. This site is about sharing our knowledge and getting new ideas on how to improve our techniques. I sincerely hope you'll work with us to achieve this goal.

Finally, I wanted to mention that we are not "SurroundBy US" (as you write at the top of your post). We are SurroundByUs, as in "by ourselves" and as in "bios". Over the last three days, we have had visitors from 56 countries and speaking 33 languages. It does not get much more international than this. Indeed, music is a universal language

Cheers!

I do work as an engineer (independent) and mix in stereo and surround. I moderate Tascamforums.com and over there is allso a little corner of surround sound. I own an spam 20ch. 5.1. mixingconsole and have a DAW wich includes a joystick for surround panning.

I have a Yamaha surround processor somewhere in storage wich gives "surround" out of stereo sources. It is totally bogus. If there are other methods wich do work better I am all ears.

I suppose nobody here has ever heard of a SOUNDFIELD microphone. Wich is the way to capture buzzing bees on a field with butterflowers and hear them move about. (4 capsules capturing the soundfield)

The surround field live capturing is one field wich is true surround. The other thing is captured in the MOVIE ; THE GLADIATOR. And is done by severall artists where surround is an EFFECT. Such stuff needs to be planned and takes quite a while before the right effect in the mix has been achieved.

The only thing I am concerned about is is this. A fake surround field could lead to disfunctioning. As you are no longer aware of what is what. Spatial information is what helps us when a car is going really fast and we are crossing a road with our back towards the coming car. We are warned by the sound and our ability to locate it's source....

It's just that this is something we should cherish and artificial mods of stereo to surround are ..... fake.... They could sound wonderfull....

I'm just worried.....

I'm already encouraged by you coming back and posting again, Muziekschuur. Like I said, I can absolutely accept some healthy skepticism from someone with your background who's encountered us for the first time.

Have you had a chance to take a look at SPEC yet? Play around with it. Open it up in Plogue and look at what is being done with the music. It sounds like you have the technical knowledge to follow with Zeeround is doing here. Throw some material at it and attempt some tweaking. I still maintain that, acknowledging your current concern, you're going to come out of this experience pleasantly surprised.

When you think about it, stereo is "squashed surround". You take a 360-degree soundfield and you squash it into a flat plane in front of the listener. You pan voices and instruments in this flat soundfield to create more discreteness, but clearly, you lose information in the process. That bee that was flying all around you is now staying in front of you (and you know it's not reality).

What we do is reversing this process by using the panning and frequency information from the stereo soundfield to extrapolate it into a 360-degree soundfield. Grant you, it is imperfect, especially if most sounds are panned towards the center or both sides are very similar , but some stereo mixes are really rich in possibilities.

At the end of the day, chances are much higher that the real 5.1 bee will be all over the place in a "fake 5.1" mix than in a "squashed 2.0" mix. Only the recording engineer knows exactly where the bee went, you can let your imagination fill the gaps.

Muziekschuur,

FYI I was a sound engineer by profession in the 80's. Mostly Sound Reinforcement but some live recording and mix down. I mixed live "main" or "monitor" sounds for all the bands that game through a California College town. Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, Tommy Twotone, spam Charles, Scandal, to name just a few that come to mind. I also built a couple of public radio studio's from the ground up, and did broadcast engineering work for most radio stations in the county. Also did lots of live remote broadcasts of local bands and classical stuff.

Largest mixing board was 24x8 tascam, but at times we ganged together more channels by using multiple boards. I personally owned a biamp 16 ch. board, which I modified so that all the sends were post fader and EQ, so utilizing all the sends and the pan pot I had a 16x4 monitor board (4 completely independent mixes).

Recording wise I guess my biggest claim to fame was a live recording of Tom Scott, which was used on NPR's Jazz Alive show, a special on Jazz Fusion. That was the Tascam 24x8 board and 4 track Tascam real to real with DBX. I also did the stereo mix down and that's what was used on Jazz Alive.

Re: "True" surround, it's true that if you are one of those folks who wants surround sound to sound like you are an audience member and all the band sound should come from the front channels and nothing but ambient sounds and crowd noise around and behind you then yes, you won't be happy with what we do here. You'll be happier over at the various ambisonic sites where everything is live recordings using the multi-capsule mics you mentioned.

If however you like to be IN the sound, more like a band member than an audience member, and/or you WANT to hear the producer's stereo sound field wrapped all the way around you then I think you will love the results you can get here.

I think you will also be surprised how much better music sounds with the main vocal having it's own channel. In fact, by virtue of different sounds getting their own channel in conversions we are often surprised how "clear" things sound and hear things we never noticed in the original. Perhaps this has to do with the individual speakers only producing one instrument instead of several, or perhaps it has to do with sounds being isolated more spatially? Psychoacoustics is a complicated beast but whatever the cause some people have named the surprising results "the WOW factor".

Anyway, yeah it'd be fun if we had access to the original multi-tracks and track sheets of our favorite music, but even if we did (and when I have) I'd mix more like I was sitting on the drum throne with the band standing around the drum kit.

To each his/her own I guess.

Hope you try our methods!

I promise to test your product{s} this week and come back.

I do hope that we head to a new era of music where surround sound with the use of 96khz/24bit files will have more "spam" source information and thus will lead to new user experiences.

Cheers,


Muziekschuur