ABSTRACT
At least as far as the music-only market is concerned, the concept of high-fidelity surround sound seems to have slowly descended into confusion. In the 1970s there had been a previous attempt to market music in surround-sound, in the form of the 4-channel quadraphonic systems, but by the early 1980s they had largely disappeared. Walt Disney's animation film Fantasia featured multi-channel surround audio 30 years before the record companies made their first, albeit short-lived, forays into quadraphonics. Dolby did the cinema industry a great service in the 1970s, when Dolby Stereo was introduced, by clearly specifying their intentions for the use of their cinema systems and issuing adequate guidelines to mixing personnel. Dolby Stereo used a single channel to envelop the audience, distributed via multiple loudspeakers. In a relatively dead room, such as in many control rooms, the surround channels would almost disappear because the nulls would face the listeners and there would be few opposing surfaces of sufficient reflectivity.
