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Speaker 1: tex Stole from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tex stuff. My name is Chris Polette.
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Sitting across from me as he always does. His senior writer,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, a sailor, travels to many lands, any place
Speaker 1: he pleases, and he always remembers to wash his hands
Speaker 1: so's he don't get no diseases. That's so pleasant today. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, wash your hands, okay, has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with what we're gonna talk about. No, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about surround the sound. Indeed we are. Actually we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about the the effect of surround sounding. Surround sound
Speaker 1: itself is kind of a I mean, the term came
Speaker 1: from Dolby, but the concept goes back much further. Yes,
Speaker 1: indeed it does, so, I mean, it's pretty simple concept.
Speaker 1: The idea of surround sound is that you want to
Speaker 1: create sound in a using recorded sound. You want to
Speaker 1: be able to play that recorded sound back in a
Speaker 1: way that sounds like you know, you're in the center
Speaker 1: of all the stuff that's going on that you know,
Speaker 1: you've got you've got sounds coming from various directions around you,
Speaker 1: so it feels more immersive. Yeah, if you ever been
Speaker 1: to the movie theater watching a movie where things are
Speaker 1: you know, someone walks off screen and it you know,
Speaker 1: you get the idea that they're behind you because you
Speaker 1: can hear their boots crunching on the gravel from coming
Speaker 1: from a speaker behind your head, and you go, wow,
Speaker 1: that was really cool. That was that was essentially surround sound. Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: we're mainly going to focus on surround sound um in
Speaker 1: the home theater environment, not in the movie theater where
Speaker 1: we are going to do a Movies and Sound podcast.
Speaker 1: The will be part of our Movie Making Technology series,
Speaker 1: so don't worry, we will get into that, and the
Speaker 1: two are related to one another, but we're mainly focusing
Speaker 1: on like if you want to set up your own
Speaker 1: home theater and what sort of options do you have?
Speaker 1: And you know, what was the progress of surround sound? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: of course surround sound actually started in the movies. Sure.
Speaker 1: The first the first one I could find reference to
Speaker 1: was fantas Sound, which was created by a couple of
Speaker 1: Disney engineers for the release of Fantasia UM. But it
Speaker 1: was it was a very manual process at that point.
Speaker 1: Basically they had the track uh playing through different speakers,
Speaker 1: two different speakers, and what they would do would be
Speaker 1: to turn one down and the other up uh manually
Speaker 1: so under direction of somebody, so that it appeared to
Speaker 1: to have the effect of moving across one another. Because
Speaker 1: originally we're talking about monophonic sound mono meaning one, so
Speaker 1: you have one sound source and all the sound is
Speaker 1: coming from that source. Now you could have multiple speakers
Speaker 1: hooked up to a monophonic system and it would just
Speaker 1: be that that same sound, the same the exact same
Speaker 1: sound would be coming from each speaker at the same intensity. UH.
Speaker 1: So you know, you could make yourself feel like you
Speaker 1: were in the center of sound by putting a series
Speaker 1: of monophonic sterry speakers around you, but there'll be no
Speaker 1: differentiation there. It wouldn't be like you could hear the
Speaker 1: violins off on one side while the cellos are are
Speaker 1: behind them and and the brass section is to the
Speaker 1: other side. You wouldn't be able to get that differentiation.
Speaker 1: It would be the sound of the entire orchestra being
Speaker 1: all around you everywhere. M Yeah, Actually I misspoke because
Speaker 1: the article that I had found in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Society of Motion Picture Engineers by William E. Garritty and
Speaker 1: Janny Hawkins, so that there was a center channel and
Speaker 1: two speakers, one on either side of the center. So
Speaker 1: what they would do would be to change the U
Speaker 1: turn one up and the other down on the side speakers.
Speaker 1: The center speaker would would continuously play the monophonic sound
Speaker 1: right for that, but I straight manually fading it in
Speaker 1: and out. And that's not terribly terribly different from what
Speaker 1: goes on now, but it's so much more sophisticated, right, right,
Speaker 1: So after monophonic sound, we could talk quickly about stereophonic sounds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the concept where you divide the sound up into
Speaker 1: multiple channels and then you direct the the channels to
Speaker 1: specific speakers. Um. And we generally think of this as
Speaker 1: uh as as being a two speaker system, but technically
Speaker 1: stereophonic can refer to more than just two. It's just
Speaker 1: that you know, in the common vernacular, when you say stereo,
Speaker 1: you think of two speakers, so generally a left and
Speaker 1: right speaker. This is the kind of sound system that
Speaker 1: works really well with headphones, so that you record certain
Speaker 1: sounds on the left channel or in certain sounds of
Speaker 1: the right channel, or you mix them so that certain
Speaker 1: sounds only kind of come across on the left or
Speaker 1: the right um. And by doing that you can give
Speaker 1: the sort of the illusion that you are in the
Speaker 1: middle of whatever it is it's making the sound that
Speaker 1: The example everyone always uses is orchestras because I mean,
Speaker 1: you think about it that it's it's easy enough to say,
Speaker 1: all right, well, this would be like if you were
Speaker 1: standing directly in front of the orchestra, because if you
Speaker 1: were there, you would be able to hear that the
Speaker 1: you know, all the music is coming from the orchestra
Speaker 1: in front of you, but different parts of the orchestra
Speaker 1: are generating that sound at different times, so you would
Speaker 1: hear like the violence would sound like they were off
Speaker 1: to one side, and the brass would sound like it's
Speaker 1: on the other side. UM. So, the the goal of
Speaker 1: stereo was to try and recreate that sensation as accurately
Speaker 1: as possible when you're playing it back yourself. And it's
Speaker 1: a pretty simple and a pretty simple concept. Right You're
Speaker 1: sending one set signals to the left speaker, and one
Speaker 1: says signals to the right speaker, and both maybe playing
Speaker 1: some sounds at the same time, but they'll also be
Speaker 1: playing sounds that are unique to that particular speaker. That's true.
Speaker 1: Surround sound GET does that and makes it way more complicated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think I would throw in my my
Speaker 1: my pet research project here, Okay, Yeah, because it's a
Speaker 1: good bridging. Yeah, I was thinking about the areas we
Speaker 1: were sort of what I was mulling over. UM. One
Speaker 1: of the things I told Jonathan I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about was quadraphonic sound UM, which I had always heard
Speaker 1: about UM growing up in the seventies and eighties, but
Speaker 1: never really had the opportunity to experience. And it's very
Speaker 1: hard to experience now, But it was just because people
Speaker 1: don't use it really anymore. But guadrophonic sound, if you've
Speaker 1: ever heard of it, it is as you would expect
Speaker 1: with the prefix quad uh four channel version UM with
Speaker 1: left front, right front, left rear, and right rear speakers UM.
Speaker 1: And this it was sort of an early seventies project.
Speaker 1: A lot of the the high fidelity type audio manufacturers
Speaker 1: came out with equipment that would support it. UM you
Speaker 1: would see eight track tapes, vinyl records and real to
Speaker 1: real audio tape with you know recordings and in quadraphonic format.
Speaker 1: UM and it pretty much works very in very very
Speaker 1: similar ways to UH to stereo sound. The problem I
Speaker 1: think probably was judging from my research, is that it
Speaker 1: required special equipment. The eight tracks that had it were
Speaker 1: formatted differently. UM. They had only one side with fewer
Speaker 1: programs rather than two sides. UM and uh. You know,
Speaker 1: to to play a vinyl record, you had to have
Speaker 1: a special stylist because the grooves were cut a little
Speaker 1: differently to support the different channels. Since you have four
Speaker 1: discrete channels of audio going to four different you know,
Speaker 1: each channel is going to a different speaker. UM. The
Speaker 1: of course, here, the idea is that the listener would
Speaker 1: be in the center of this the square that's made
Speaker 1: by the four speakers, and that through managing the levels
Speaker 1: of each speaker and the types of sound that are
Speaker 1: coming through speaker, you could create you know, a sound
Speaker 1: scape if you want to. You know that that's a
Speaker 1: pretty common term term soundscaping, where you're trying to create
Speaker 1: a particular experience through sound to make it very immersive.
Speaker 1: And uh and and you know, audiophiles are always looking
Speaker 1: for the really immersive and really um um well true
Speaker 1: to life, yeah, playback option because you want you want
Speaker 1: to sound at least if you're an audio file, you
Speaker 1: want to sound as close to as if you were
Speaker 1: actually there when the sound was being generated as possible. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The uh, the system also required a special demodulator to um,
Speaker 1: especially if you were going to play both stereophonic, well monophonic,
Speaker 1: stereophonic and quadrophonic records on the same system. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: it really was kind of equipment intensive. Um. And then
Speaker 1: there was another format of quadrophonic sound, Compact Discrete four
Speaker 1: or c D four not to be confused at all,
Speaker 1: the compact disc format UM, and it you know, it
Speaker 1: was one of those things where it was a format war.
Speaker 1: JVC was was behind this, and they apparently a lot
Speaker 1: of people really liked it, uh or really really hated it,
Speaker 1: depending on whom you ask. UM. But they were incompatible formats,
Speaker 1: and I think the cost of the equipment and the
Speaker 1: mess with all the different formats kind of you know,
Speaker 1: caused the whole quadraphonic thing to fade away. And then
Speaker 1: of course we got into uh as we moved into
Speaker 1: the nineties, we got into CDs, and you know, people
Speaker 1: weren't making CDs to to work with quadrophonic sound anymore,
Speaker 1: so it just disappeared. Yeah. Um, I mean audiophiles will
Speaker 1: probably still cry out and say, hey, I still have
Speaker 1: my quadraphonic system and it's awesome, because they're very proud
Speaker 1: of them. I mean they do. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of people who still have them out there, But you
Speaker 1: have to find the equipment that actually still works. Is
Speaker 1: the problem, because no one's manufacturing it, right, the equipment
Speaker 1: and the the you know, the stuff to play on it. Um,
Speaker 1: and someone is manufacturing it, they're probably a very small manufacturer, right. So,
Speaker 1: so true quadrophonic sound is you have four audio channels
Speaker 1: and you have four speakers, and so you've got it's
Speaker 1: it's four it's called four four four because it's it's
Speaker 1: it stays four discrete channels through the whole um, the
Speaker 1: whole process. You can also achieve quadrophonic sound, and some
Speaker 1: quadraphonic systems were able to do this by getting four
Speaker 1: lines of information out of two lines of information. This
Speaker 1: gets really kind of a kind of confusing, but that's
Speaker 1: called like the four to four processing system. Right, So
Speaker 1: you start off with four different UM channels. You can
Speaker 1: press that down into two lines of information, and then
Speaker 1: you have a decoder that brings it back up to four.
Speaker 1: And uh, I'll see if I can explain this in
Speaker 1: a way that makes sense. It's hard to do when
Speaker 1: you don't have a visual to go with it. So
Speaker 1: maybe maybe at some point UM UH will do some
Speaker 1: sort of video where we'll talk about this. But if
Speaker 1: you do find this confusing, we have some great articles
Speaker 1: on the site on both how movie sound works and
Speaker 1: how surround sound works where you can kind of see
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. So with a four two four
Speaker 1: system you have for the four different kinds of information
Speaker 1: information are the the sounds that are unique to your
Speaker 1: left speaker. This is again in a in like a
Speaker 1: a regular surround sound system. You have the information that
Speaker 1: is only going to the right speaker, you have the
Speaker 1: information that's going to both, and then you have the
Speaker 1: information that's only going to the surround speaker. So this
Speaker 1: would normally be a speaker that's to your left, a
Speaker 1: speaker to this's your right, and the speaker that's behind you, okay, um.
Speaker 1: And the way that they get the the last two
Speaker 1: to work. Uh. It all depends on whether or not
Speaker 1: the signals are in phase or out of phase with
Speaker 1: each other. So left and right is easy right, because
Speaker 1: you're just sending the information to one speaker or the
Speaker 1: other speaker. Sending it to both is also easy. You
Speaker 1: send both both speakers the same information or both sides
Speaker 1: the same information at the same time. So if you
Speaker 1: were to look at the waves like the sound waves,
Speaker 1: they would match up perfectly. It'd be the same amplitude
Speaker 1: and same frequency. To do the surround sound. What they
Speaker 1: do is too so that you don't get the sound
Speaker 1: from the front speakers, the ones that are in front
Speaker 1: of you, and you want to just get the ones
Speaker 1: that are around you. Uh, you put them out of phase.
Speaker 1: And by saying out of phase that what that means
Speaker 1: is that when you have the peak of the sound
Speaker 1: wave from one speaker, it matches the trough of the
Speaker 1: sound wave of the other speaker, so it's opposite exactly,
Speaker 1: it's opposite. So while one is speaking, the other one
Speaker 1: is a trough. And this is important. This this relates
Speaker 1: to how the speaker itself moves. There's a speaker cone
Speaker 1: in your speaker that vibrates. That vibration is what generates
Speaker 1: the sound you hear, which is also kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: We'll have to do a podcast just about speakers at
Speaker 1: one point to talk about how a little vibrating speaker
Speaker 1: cone can generate all the different sounds you hear when
Speaker 1: you listen to any prerecorded stuff, or actually any broadcast stuff,
Speaker 1: anything that's coming over a speaker. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: this little vibrating film that's generating that sound. So anyway,
Speaker 1: the when it's out of phase like that, the two
Speaker 1: sound waves cancel each other out, so we don't really
Speaker 1: perceive them. Yeah, that's sort of, in a way, a
Speaker 1: little bit like how noise canceling headphones work. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's exactly the way noise canceling headphones work. In the
Speaker 1: sense that you want to be able to create a
Speaker 1: wave that matches but is out of phase with the
Speaker 1: the one that you're trying to dampen, right, and so
Speaker 1: you get the dampened the dampened speakers, you don't hear
Speaker 1: the sound from. You do hear the sound from the
Speaker 1: surround sound speakers. Um, And all it takes is encoding
Speaker 1: the these lines of information the right way so that
Speaker 1: the waves match up or don't match up. And then
Speaker 1: when it's played back through whatever system you're using, usually
Speaker 1: like a DVD system or whatever, UM, there's a decoder
Speaker 1: that takes those two lines of information and then decodes
Speaker 1: that into the four the four different streams UM. So
Speaker 1: that that's kind of that was kind of the next step.
Speaker 1: And like I said, some of the quadriphonic systems were
Speaker 1: able to do that. They weren't just the four four
Speaker 1: four discrete systems UM those great little phase shifts. I
Speaker 1: find that really fascinating. It also meant that if you
Speaker 1: had a left speaker and a right speaker and they
Speaker 1: were playing the right frequencies, you would get an effect
Speaker 1: as if there were a speaker directly in front of you,
Speaker 1: and that that we call that the phantom speaker because
Speaker 1: there's not a physical device that's generating that sound. It's
Speaker 1: just because the way that the other two stereo speakers
Speaker 1: are are generating sound at the same time, it gives
Speaker 1: you the effect that there is a speaker there. Okay,
Speaker 1: we'll see that. That makes so much more sense now
Speaker 1: because I thought it was a speaker that could punch
Speaker 1: you so hard that it would leave an impression of
Speaker 1: its bringing your face. See, I thought it was a
Speaker 1: speaker that was supposed to be developed to play all
Speaker 1: these different video games, but never actually came out. We're
Speaker 1: just making phantom jokes now, and someone's going to complain
Speaker 1: because those are inside jokes, not even inside jokes, really, folks,
Speaker 1: that's just reference. That's simon and inside joke. We're just
Speaker 1: making very obscure references. Uh. So that that four too,
Speaker 1: four is an example of a matrix system. The matrix
Speaker 1: are the systems where the processing systems where you you
Speaker 1: you combine various lines of of channels into one or
Speaker 1: two or however many discrete. Um. Uh, Well, I guess
Speaker 1: discreet would be the wrong word, because discreet would mean
Speaker 1: that you would have one per one channel, person per speaker.
Speaker 1: But it's when you combine these this lines of information
Speaker 1: that will later be decoded to become UMU to go
Speaker 1: to each individual speaker so that you get that surround
Speaker 1: sound effect. Um. Did you want to talk about the
Speaker 1: differences between things like five point one, six point one,
Speaker 1: seven point one, etcetera. Well, yeah, that's uh, that's essentially
Speaker 1: the number of speakers, or actually the number of channels
Speaker 1: that you have. The first number is the number of
Speaker 1: regular channels. In the second is the number of I
Speaker 1: guess base, yeah, lf E low frequency UM channels. That's
Speaker 1: what's going to your subwoffer. Yeah. Yeah, And it sort
Speaker 1: of reminds me of what a friend of mine used
Speaker 1: to call the earthquake speaker. I used to uh used
Speaker 1: to go to a club that had one of the
Speaker 1: you couldn't even tell it was on. It was this
Speaker 1: giant cube. It was one of the speakers that it
Speaker 1: was created for the movie Earthquake in the seventies, and
Speaker 1: its job was not to make a sound that you
Speaker 1: could hear. It was. Its job was to make a
Speaker 1: sound that you could feel that made it feel the
Speaker 1: floor feel like it was shaking, but you couldn't hear
Speaker 1: anything coming out of it. Was just that the base
Speaker 1: was that low, right, it was beyond beyond the range
Speaker 1: of human hearing exactly. Yes, we can definitely sense it
Speaker 1: through uh, Like like you said, you could feel it, yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's the same sort of thing that when
Speaker 1: you go see a movie where there's a big explosion
Speaker 1: and you feel you're feeling your chair rumbled. That's that's
Speaker 1: what that is. So that's yeah, the five, the five
Speaker 1: point the h and that speaker. The speakers in and
Speaker 1: home theater systems are not nearly as uh you know,
Speaker 1: powerful as those used for the movie theaters and your
Speaker 1: average home theater system last year, because there are there
Speaker 1: are a few crazy people out there who have some
Speaker 1: really powerful speaker systems and a whole lot of money
Speaker 1: to blow on that, because we're talking like, you know,
Speaker 1: the tens of thousands of dollars for for these kind
Speaker 1: of speakers, but the kind that you would pick up
Speaker 1: at your local electronics store for most people is uh
Speaker 1: probably these days, I would I would guess at five
Speaker 1: point one or seven point one, in which case you've
Speaker 1: got um, the center speaker. Uh. In the case at
Speaker 1: five point one, two in the front and two on
Speaker 1: the side, or you know, just behind you. Um, the
Speaker 1: seven speaker set up is a little more diverse. You've
Speaker 1: got a couple behind you and maybe even I guess
Speaker 1: a real real channel. There's a six point one too.
Speaker 1: Well it's a single one behind you and then the
Speaker 1: other one has the two So yeah, it's it's just
Speaker 1: basically dividing the number of channels up and the more
Speaker 1: the more channels you've got the more speakers you've got,
Speaker 1: so you you placed them strategically around you to create
Speaker 1: that that sound, and you just took up the channels indicated.
Speaker 1: And the strategically part is very important because the sound
Speaker 1: has been designed for specific for it to come from
Speaker 1: a specific direction exactly. In other words, with five point one,
Speaker 1: you couldn't just you know, put the five speakers around
Speaker 1: you in any orientation. Yeah, you have to put them
Speaker 1: in a certain place if you want to achieve the
Speaker 1: desired effect. I suppose you could put them in in
Speaker 1: just random places and it would be kind of weird,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it wouldn't don't match up to anything you
Speaker 1: were watching or now if you're just listening to music,
Speaker 1: it might not make as big a difference. It just
Speaker 1: wouldn't give you the effect that was intended. Now, so
Speaker 1: five point one, Yeah, you've got that. You've got your
Speaker 1: center channel. So that's that's usually in the movies, the
Speaker 1: center channel is where most of the dialogue comes from.
Speaker 1: That's because it appears to be coming from the screen,
Speaker 1: right right. Yeah, It's one of those things where we
Speaker 1: just we've kind of trained ourselves that if we're looking
Speaker 1: at a person and they're talking. Uh, the sounds should
Speaker 1: pretty much come from that direction. Um. It's only if
Speaker 1: a character is off screen and talking that we normally
Speaker 1: would hear that person speaking through one of the other speakers, uh,
Speaker 1: the other. So that you've got that's number one is
Speaker 1: your center channel. Then you've got your front left in
Speaker 1: your front right, which are usually set you know obviously
Speaker 1: off to the side, to the left and right of
Speaker 1: the center channel. UM. Then you have your rear left
Speaker 1: and your rear right audio and those would be behind
Speaker 1: the viewer or listener. So that's the five. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got one five, the three in the front and
Speaker 1: two in the rear. Then you've got the point one
Speaker 1: would be the sub Wliffer six point one. Usually, UM,
Speaker 1: it depends because there's no set standard for surround sound.
Speaker 1: There are many companies that have come up with different
Speaker 1: surround sound UM approaches, but in general a six point
Speaker 1: one surround sound set up there's usually an additional rear
Speaker 1: center speaker and that's normally used specifically for sound effects.
Speaker 1: So it's not you know, that's to give you that
Speaker 1: more rich immersive experience, but it never it didn't really
Speaker 1: take off. Six point one just was one of those
Speaker 1: things where you know it just it was it was
Speaker 1: almost people begin to view it, I guess as we
Speaker 1: would get this just because we can. And it never
Speaker 1: really took off, at least in the home market. Seven
Speaker 1: point one does rearrange the orientation a little bit. Uh,
Speaker 1: So you've got instead of the additional rear speaker, Um,
Speaker 1: you've got additional speaker to your left and one to
Speaker 1: your right. So you've got you've got the three in
Speaker 1: front of you. You've got one tier left, one tier
Speaker 1: right like immediately to your left and right, and then
Speaker 1: the two behind you. And so that's that's all seven
Speaker 1: right there. Uh and then right now is pretty much
Speaker 1: the top of the home theater system. But it's not
Speaker 1: people of course are not stopping there. Why would they.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, that that's usually what you would see
Speaker 1: in your local electronics store five five point one in
Speaker 1: seven point one systems, Yeah, you might see some six
Speaker 1: point ones too, but like I said, they didn't really
Speaker 1: take off very much. So usually you see, you know,
Speaker 1: the five point one being the more um popular is
Speaker 1: probably the wrong word, but just that's the one you're
Speaker 1: going to find the most often. I think seven point
Speaker 1: one you'll find when you're looking at some of the
Speaker 1: higher end sound systems. I'm sure there's some that are
Speaker 1: in the more approachable like low end market by now,
Speaker 1: but um, I haven't been in the market for home
Speaker 1: theater system in a long time, so I don't I
Speaker 1: wouldn't really know. But I wanted to talk just briefly
Speaker 1: about another experimental system which was developed by Tomlinson Holman
Speaker 1: of t H Labs and uh really I wonder how
Speaker 1: they got their name. Yeah, uh, yeah, he was. He
Speaker 1: was a guy who was behind the the th h
Speaker 1: X quality assurance standards. UM. So yeah, th h X.
Speaker 1: If you if you're familiar with th X sound, that's
Speaker 1: not actually a a sound recording or uh playback method. Really,
Speaker 1: it's a set of standards that um that any sort
Speaker 1: of system is supposed to meet in order to It's
Speaker 1: almost like a certification like if you if you meet
Speaker 1: certain requirements, then you can be th X certified. But
Speaker 1: he developed ten point to surround sound. Yeah, so ten
Speaker 1: point two. First of all, you got the point to
Speaker 1: which tells you that you have two sub wiffers. Do
Speaker 1: they go in different places? Yes, you have one on
Speaker 1: the left and one on the right, which is pretty
Speaker 1: odd because usually most most surround sound system designers will
Speaker 1: tell you it doesn't really matter where you put the
Speaker 1: subwiffer because again, you're not hearing it, you're feeling it.
Speaker 1: So as long as as long as your subwoffer has
Speaker 1: sufficient power and the room it's in is not you know,
Speaker 1: the wrong size, like you don't want a little subwiffer
Speaker 1: in a huge room, right, Um, as long as as
Speaker 1: long as it's a big enough subwoffer and it's getting
Speaker 1: enough power, it shouldn't matter where you put it because
Speaker 1: you should still feel the effect. We're not quite so
Speaker 1: sensitive that we can detect the origin of that rumbling
Speaker 1: that we're feeling as we're watching. You know, Bruce Willis
Speaker 1: run away from an explosion. But the ten point two
Speaker 1: has two subworiffers, one on the left, one the right.
Speaker 1: So the idea being that if you do tune it
Speaker 1: just right, you should be able to experience that rumbling
Speaker 1: as it passes through the theater. So let's say you're
Speaker 1: watching a movie like Twister and there's a tornado that's
Speaker 1: moving from the left side of the screen to the
Speaker 1: right side of the screen. If you timed it just right,
Speaker 1: you might be able to give you that feeling that hey,
Speaker 1: there's something really huge coming from the left and now
Speaker 1: it's moved over there to the right. UM. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I've never experienced this particular system, so I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how effective it is. Uh. But then let's see
Speaker 1: they've got you've got your three speakers in the front,
Speaker 1: so you've got your center, your left center, in your
Speaker 1: right center. Then you have UM a left and right speaker.
Speaker 1: Then you've got three additional UM left and right speakers,
Speaker 1: so these are the ones that are going going around
Speaker 1: the back of you right, and then you have an
Speaker 1: upper left and upper right speaker give your sense of height.
Speaker 1: So that makes Yeah, the goal here is to give
Speaker 1: you because we've got it. We've we've developed surround sounds
Speaker 1: so that we get up pretty much a kind of
Speaker 1: a one and eighty degree sound environment right where where
Speaker 1: we could theoretically have in a really good surround sound system.
Speaker 1: Have a character as if this character we're walking around
Speaker 1: us in a circle, like we're staying stationary in the center,
Speaker 1: and this character walks around us and delivers a speech,
Speaker 1: it would sound as if this arter is actually walking
Speaker 1: around us right right, because they're feeding the audio through
Speaker 1: the different channels, right, and they're fading it out and
Speaker 1: bringing it up at just the right moment to create
Speaker 1: this illusion, this audio illusion. Well, the ten point two
Speaker 1: is the goal is to create a three hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty degree soundscape around you. So now the character could
Speaker 1: go overhead and continue talking and it would sound to
Speaker 1: you as if the person was not only going around you,
Speaker 1: but was going over on top of you. So Superman,
Speaker 1: for example, could do a little slow fly over and
Speaker 1: speak to you and it would sound like he's going
Speaker 1: directly overhead. Um, that's the goal. Again. I don't know
Speaker 1: how successful it was, because I my invitation must have
Speaker 1: been lost. I didn't get to go to this, uh,
Speaker 1: this experiment. You know, it would be interesting to see
Speaker 1: what what kind of stuff they do have at CEES
Speaker 1: related to surround sound, you know, and I've sat through
Speaker 1: some surround sound demonstrations at c e S. But in
Speaker 1: in general, the CS stuff is really just another example
Speaker 1: of the technology we're already familiar with. It's just them
Speaker 1: fine tuning it, making the speakers more powerful, trying to
Speaker 1: create sounds more accurately so that there there's a better
Speaker 1: precision to playing back sound. UM, it's not really developing
Speaker 1: the three dimensional aspect as much as it is you know,
Speaker 1: making sure you're reproducing sound as accurately as possible. But
Speaker 1: that's the general concept behind surround sound. I mean really,
Speaker 1: like we said, when you get down to it, the
Speaker 1: idea behind it is pretty simple. You just want to
Speaker 1: create the right kind of sounds that the right kind
Speaker 1: of location to give you that immersive experience. But when
Speaker 1: you actually get around to trying to develop the technology
Speaker 1: to do it, uh, it gets really complicated. And even
Speaker 1: though we've talked about five point one six point one,
Speaker 1: seven point one tin point to all this stuff, as
Speaker 1: we said at the beginning, there are multiple ways of
Speaker 1: achieving this. UM. The way that Dolby does it is
Speaker 1: different from the way it's Sony does it. UM. They
Speaker 1: all have the same goal and they all essentially use
Speaker 1: the same sort of speakers, but they use different encoding
Speaker 1: methods and decoding methods. Which is why if you are
Speaker 1: shopping for say a DVD player, some DVD players will
Speaker 1: tell you that they can play uh, Dolby Digital, but
Speaker 1: they can't. You know, they may not have anything on
Speaker 1: there about other surround sound methods. Most of them have
Speaker 1: support from multiple surround sound uh technologies, which is good
Speaker 1: because different companies use different surround sound vendors. So you know,
Speaker 1: you could buy two different DVDs and one of them
Speaker 1: sounds amazing on your system and the other one just
Speaker 1: sounds like regular mono to you almost or stereo um
Speaker 1: really Uh. It's important to to look at the the
Speaker 1: model of whatever technology it is you're buying, whether it's
Speaker 1: a stereo system or theater in a box or a
Speaker 1: DVD player, the decoder is the most important part of
Speaker 1: that um of that system as far as surround sounds
Speaker 1: is concerned, because you could have as many speakers as
Speaker 1: you want, but if you don't have the right decoder,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get that surround sound effect right
Speaker 1: because otherwise, you know, it's basically running traffic. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: to the different to the different channels. Yeah, it has to.
Speaker 1: It has to be able to identify what sound goes
Speaker 1: where and when. Um, which you know, again, we we
Speaker 1: tend to to imbue our technology with a little artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: which is misleading, but you know it's it's just slightly
Speaker 1: better than me saying it's magic, which I've always tempted
Speaker 1: to do when I sit down here, just because it
Speaker 1: would make these podcasts go a lot faster and I
Speaker 1: can get back to other stuff. Elves. Elves make it work. Yes,
Speaker 1: So anyway, that wraps up surround Sound. If you guys
Speaker 1: have any comments or questions or you have suggestions for
Speaker 1: other topics, like I that we will be doing a
Speaker 1: movie sound and podcast in the future to kind of
Speaker 1: be a partner with this one as well as part
Speaker 1: of our movie making technology podcast. We'll even probably go
Speaker 1: into more detail about the house around sound came about
Speaker 1: in movie theaters and probably talk about Fantasia specifically. Um
Speaker 1: so keep an ear out for that, huh, And did
Speaker 1: you have something else said? No, I was gonna say
Speaker 1: we probably, I would imagine get into a little bit
Speaker 1: more about Delby and DTS and all that stuff into yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's really applies a lot more right. It all
Speaker 1: started in the movies and then migrated to home theater.
Speaker 1: So if you guys are disappointed that we didn't go
Speaker 1: into more detail about Delbi or DTS, we're really looking
Speaker 1: at doing that for the movie sound. Actually, the movie
Speaker 1: Sound may end up being two podcasts just because we'd
Speaker 1: have to talk about how they get the sound to
Speaker 1: match up with the movie, as well as the various
Speaker 1: surround sound methods. But that's good. It just means that
Speaker 1: we have fewer topics that we have to brainstorm. Yes,
Speaker 1: just did we end up to saying which one when
Speaker 1: we're going to get around to them? By the way,
Speaker 1: the way we do that is through growing darts? Probably guessed,
Speaker 1: but it's true. And we will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. If you're a tech stuff and be sure
Speaker 1: to check us out on Twitter tech Stuff hs wsr handle,
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