Surround sound Wikipedia. Surround sound is a technique for enriching the sound reproduction quality of an audio source with additional audio channels from speakers that surround the listener surround channels. Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to surround sound, standard theater sound systems had three screen channels of sound, emitted by loudspeakers located only in front of the audience at the left, center, and right. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers behind the listener, thus is able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction 3. There are various surround sound based formats and techniques, varying in reproduction and recording methods along with the number and positioning of additional channels. The most common surround sound specification, the ITUs 5. Whether youre a professional audio editor or just a musical hobbyist, digital audio workstation software applications comprise a huge part of your music production. Turn your headphones into a mixing and tracking tool you can trust use Nx to mix more reliably on headphones and monitor more accurately while recording. UAD software is not compatible with mobile devices. Please download this software from your Mac or PC. VideoMeld features include High quality HD video up to 1920x1080 and save as MPEG 4 H. 264 High quality 8 channel audio 7. 1 surround sound. Center C in front of the listener, Left L and Right R at angles of 6. Left Surround LS and Right Surround RS at angles of 1. Surround sound is characterized by a listener location or sweet spot where the audio effects work best, and presents a fixed or forward perspective of the sound field to the listener at this location. The technique enhances the perception of sound spatialization by exploiting sound localization a listeners ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. This is achieved by using multiple discrete audio channels routed to an array of loudspeakers. 1Fields of applicationeditThough cinema and soundtracks represent the major uses of surround techniques, its scope of application is broader than that as surround sound permits creation of an audio environment for all sorts of purposes. Download software in the Audio MixersSynthesizers category. Get the guaranteed best price on Multitrack Recorders like the Zoom R8 8Track SD Recorder, Sampler USB Interface at Musicians Friend. Get a low price and free. Multichannel audio techniques may be used to reproduce contents as varied as music, speech, natural or synthetic sounds for cinema, television, broadcasting, or computers. In terms of music content for example, a live performance may use multichannel techniques in the context of an open air concert, of a musical theatre or for broadcasting 2 for a film specific techniques are adapted to movie theater, or to home e. The narrative space is also a content that can be enhanced through multichannel techniques. This applies mainly to cinema narratives, for example the speech of the characters of a film,567 but may also be applied to plays for theatre, to a conference, or to integrate voice based comments in an archeological site or monument. For example, an exhibition may be enhanced with topical ambient sound of water, birds, train or machine noise. Topical natural sounds may also be used in educational applications. 8 Other fields of application include video game consoles, personal computers and other platforms. 91. In such applications, the content would typically be synthetic noise produced by the computer device in interaction with its user. Significant work has also been done using surround sound for enhanced situation awareness in military and public safety application. 1. Types of media and technologieseditCommercial surround sound media include videocassettes, DVDs, and SDTV broadcasts encoded as compressed. Dolby Digital and DTS, and lossless audio such as DTS HD Master Audio and Dolby True. HD on HDTVBlu ray Disc and HD DVD, which are identical to the studio master. Other commercial formats include the competing DVD Audio DVD A and Super Audio CD SACD formats, and MP3 Surround. Cinema 5. 1 surround formats include Dolby Digital and DTS. Sony Dynamic Digital Sound SDDS is an 8 channel cinema configuration which features 5 independent audio channels across the front with two independent surround channels, and a Low frequency effects channel. Traditional 7. 1 surround speaker configuration introduces two additional rear speakers to the conventional 5. Most surround sound recordings are created by film production companies or video game producers however some consumer camcorders have such capability either built in or available separately. Surround sound technologies can also be used in music to enable new methods of artistic expression. After the failure of quadraphonic audio in the 1. SACD and DVD Audio formats. Some AV receivers, stereophonic systems, and computer soundcards contain integral digital signal processors andor digital audio processors to simulate surround sound from a stereophonic source see fake stereo. In 1. 96. 7, the rock group Pink Floyd performed the first ever surround sound concert at Games for May, a lavish affair at Londons Queen Elizabeth Hall where the band debuted its custom made quadraphonic speaker system. 1. The control device they had made, the Azimuth Co ordinator, is now displayed at Londons Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of their Theatre Collections gallery. 1. HistoryeditThe first documented use of surround sound was in 1. Disney studios animated film Fantasia. Walt Disney was inspired by Nikolai Rimsky Korsakovs operatic piece Flight of the Bumblebee to have a bumblebee featured in his musical Fantasia and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre. The initial multichannel audio application was called Fantasound, comprising three audio channels and speakers. The sound was diffused throughout the cinema, controlled by an engineer using some 5. The surround sound was achieved using the sum and the difference of the phase of the sound. However, this experimental use of surround sound was excluded from the film in later showings. In 1. 95. 2, surround sound successfully reappeared with the film This is Cinerama, using discrete seven channel sound, and the race to develop other surround sound methods took off. 1. In the 1. 95. 0s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented with and produced ground breaking electronic compositions such as Gesang der Jnglinge and Kontakte, the latter using fully discrete and rotating quadraphonic sounds generated with industrial electronic equipment in Herbert Eimerts studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR. Edgar Vareses Poeme Electronique, created for the Iannis Xenakis designed Philips Pavilion at the 1. Brussels Worlds Fair, also utilised spatial audio with 4. In 1. 95. 7, working with artist Jordan Belson, Henry Jacobs produced Vortex Experiments in Sound and Light a series of concerts featuring new music, including some of Jacobs own, and that of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others taking place in the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Sound designers commonly regard this as the origin of the now standard concept of surround sound. The program was popular, and Jacobs and Belson were invited to reproduce it at the 1. World Expo in Brussels. 1. There are also many other composers that created ground breaking surround sound works in the same time period. In 1. 97. 8, a concept devised by Max Bell for Dolby Laboratories called split surround was tested with the movie Superman. This led to the 7. Apocalypse Now, which became one of the first formal releases in cinemas with three channels in the front and two in the rear. 1. There were typically five speakers behind the screens of 7. Left, Center and Right were used full frequency, while Center Left and Center Right were only used for bass frequencies as it is currently common. The Apocalypse Now encoderdecoder was designed by Michael Karagosian, also for Dolby Laboratories. The surround mix was produced by an Oscar winning crew led by Walter Murch for American Zoetrope.