ABSTRACT
At least as far as the music-only market is concerned, the concept of surround sound seems to
have slowly descended into a mire. In 2011 it has become very difficult to find high-fidelity
surround recordings in any commercially available format. What exists has largely become
only limited-interest, special-order-only items. Whatever is currently available as soundtracks
to video and film releases is almost invariably data-compressed in a lossy manner (meaning
that all the original quality of the recording cannot be reproduced), and hence does not comply
with the concept of high fidelity. What is more, professionally, the market for music-only
surround control rooms has largely disappeared. Whatever surround rooms that are currently
being built in recording studios are mainly in the form of post-production rooms, with
arbitrarily placed loudspeakers, and often with no means of even reproducing SACDs or
DVD-As (96 kHz, audio-only DVDs). Sub-woofer positioning and calibration is haphazard,
and response uniformity is almost non-existent. Remote gain controls are even found for
sub-woofers in professional facilities, so that low-frequency levels can be ‘adjusted to taste’
between one recording and another, or to ‘reference’ recordings which, themselves, were
probably mixed in equally arbitrarily calibrated rooms. Attitudes have degenerated to a point
where there is almost no reference for making surround mixes, and domestic listeners are
left to their own devices to get whatever they can out of a recording.
