ABSTRACT
Further Developments 551 Auro-3D 551 Dolby Atmos 552 NHK 22.2 553 Wave fi eld synthesis 554
Surround Sound Monitoring 557 Differences between two-channel and surround mixing rooms 557 Front loudspeakers in general 558
What to do with the center loudspeaker 559 Surround loudspeakers 559 Subwoofers 561
Surround Sound Recording Techniques 562 Principles of surround sound microphone technique 562 Five-channel ‘main microphone’ arrays 563 Separate treatment of front imaging and ambience 566 Pseudo-binaural techniques 571 Multimicrophone techniques 572 Ambisonic or ‘SoundField’ microphone principles 573
Multichannel Panning Techniques 574 Pairwise amplitude panning 575 ‘Ambisonic’ panning laws 576 Head-related panning 578
This chapter is concerned with the most commonly encountered multichannel (i.e. more than two channels) stereo reproduction confi gurations, most of which are often referred to as surround sound. Standards or conventions that specify basic channel or loudspeaker confi gurations are distinguished from proprietary systems such as Dolby Digital and DTS whose primary function is the coding and delivery of multichannel audio signals. The latter are discussed in the second part of the chapter, in which is also contained an explanation of the Ambisonic system for stereo signal representation. Surround sound standards often specify little more than the channel confi guration and the way the loudspeakers should be arranged. This leaves the business of how to create or represent a spatial sound fi eld entirely up to the user.
