Is 5.1 surround sound dead?

[Omeletpants]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-5...nd-for-music-and-home-theater-on-its-way-out/

 

[airtime143]

Personally, I have had the same 5.1 system for years and years and rarely use it.
It adds nothing to comedies aside from making the loud parts too loud and the quiet parts too quiet.
On the rare occasion that I do use it for action movies, it doesnt really do much for me... feeling the sound during explosions doesnt really add much to the experience.
The only reason I have not gotten rid of it is because I do occasionally turn on the music channels and run it through the receiver with the TV off.

 

[Omeletpants]

His point is that 5.1 doesnt add anything for music and that 2.1 normal stereo is better

 

[Tjodalv]

His point is that 5.1 doesnt add anything for music and that 2.1 normal stereo is better

Most of that is due to the fact that producers have never quite figured out what to do with 5.1 when recording/mixing/mastering music. They literally just didn't adopt any standard system with which to utilize it in any meaningful way. Works perfectly well for home theater formats in my opinion though.

 

[Nail Polish]

Personally, I have had the same 5.1 system for years and years and rarely use it.
It adds nothing to comedies aside from making the loud parts too loud and the quiet parts too quiet.
On the rare occasion that I do use it for action movies, it doesnt really do much for me... feeling the sound during explosions doesnt really add much to the experience.
The only reason I have not gotten rid of it is because I do occasionally turn on the music channels and run it through the receiver with the TV off.

I hate 5.1...Voices are too weak, and sound effects are too loud..I had to adjust the center speaker which carries voices way higher

 

[Dr. Manhattan]

about the only thing 5.1 Is good for is video games. I played halo with mine and loved it.

however my brother in law blew out my back speakers so now I just have stereo with a sub.

 

[Omeletpants]

about the only thing 5.1 Is good for is video games. I played halo with mine and loved it.

however my brother in law blew out my back speakers so now I just have stereo with a sub.

How do you find it for music?

 

[Dogstar]

His point is that 5.1 doesnt add anything for music and that 2.1 normal stereo is better

I have a handful of classical CDs that were mastered for 5.1, and sometimes I'll tinker with live albums, but other than that I'm almost always on 2.1.

5.1 just doesn't work well with music IMO... especially modern mastering that tends to drown out vocals.

 

[Crystallas]

Most of that is due to the fact that producers have never quite figured out what to do with 5.1 when recording/mixing/mastering music. They literally just didn't adopt any standard system with which to utilize it in any meaningful way. Works perfectly well for home theater formats in my opinion though.

ding ding ding


Allan Parsons has a whole serie of documentaries about why today's audio sucks, and here is a hint, it isn't the technology. When you have audio that is mixed properly, and the format has more than two channels, then get out da way, that sounds truly great only more than two speakers.

 

[Omeletpants]

OK, how about 2.1 and adding a second pair of speakers behind the listener? you would still be 2.1 but with 4 speakers? Very similar to what you get in a car

 

[Crystallas]

I also want to add, the red book standard was rushed and came out possibly two years before it should have. "Red Book Standard" was the adopted standard for red laser optical audio in 1978ish(I say -ish, because it wasn't officially an iso standard, just a handshake deal to how to use a very hard to understand format change at the time, until that just stuck around because nobody wanted to improve on it, and jeopardize backwards compatibility with CD players at the time).

Just to show you the real issue the industry gave itself with CD.
Vinyl - analog, so no bitrate, but in linear capacity, it is debated to be around a very theoretical 268 KHz for single channel, and 172 KHz for dual channel.
CD - 44 KHz and 16-bit for two linear streams. (Red book theoretical was 51/16 which was why high end producers objectively saw it as better)
DVD - 192 kHz and 24-bit for two linear streams.

But had the industry adopted an optical media standard just two years later, then a higher capacity disc would have been out, and much easier to work with(and I think this may have aided in having something that dropped in price quicker than CD which took about 10 years to become affordable). The new red laser would have went from 650mb according to ISO 9660 standards, to about 1.2gb single layer(and much like CD saw it's wide-adopted end near 800mb, so would the new density which would have reached 1.9gb). That would have easily allowed more than two channels to exceeded 48 KHz / 16-bit.

Then MP3 happened. That is another problem all together, because Fraunhofer/IIS developed a standard around a standard. The way MP3 is encoded, it would just add the channels and the user would select the bitrates for compression. The problem is, when you have every song in the wild, and all of it is compressed to ~128kbbs to reach that 3-4mb desired size, reintroducing another standard simply does not happen. Or worse yet, a file that can not exceed 160kbbs in quality being oversampled to 320kbbs with n00bs swearing it is better despite being mathematically impossible. Oversampling is ANOTHER problem with audio quality perception.

 

[Crystallas]

OK, how about 2.1 and adding a second pair of speakers behind the listener? you would still be 2.1 but with 4 speakers? Very similar to what you get in a car

Two channel source is two channel source, no matter how you split it up. Whether the user wants more than two channels, doesn't mean the source will give them more than just another area to hear audio spout from. Even THX and Dolby standards have this issue, because you really don't have any single industry standard for mixing four channels into two, only standards that mix two channels into four. That's mainly because of a conflict between music being released digitally today, and we all know iPods/Xunes/whatever phone wants to boast how it can store 20000000 million songs. Well, adding 4 channels to audio as a standard means every repo(rhapsody/itunes/pandora/songify/amazon) would have to double their bandwidth as well.

 

[R_Mac_1]

2.1 sucks compared to 5.1 when watching movies and playing games. I had a 7.1 system at my old house that was great. When we listed the house for sale, I scaled back to 2.1 to rearrange the living room and was always disappointed with the lack of surround. At the house I'm in now I only have 5.1 because of space limitations but it's still great.

The only time I listen to music on the system is when I'm cleaning or doing tasks around the house so I'm not sitting in font of the speakers so stereo or surround doesn't matter much to me. Often I'll set my receiver to all channel stereo just to get more sound. The only music I have that's made for surround is Dark Side of the Moon on SACD, which is pretty cool but I don't listen to it often.

Sent from my LG G2 using Tapatalk

 

[Dogstar]

The only music I have that's made for surround is Dark Side of the Moon on SACD, which is pretty cool but I don't listen to it often.

That's probably the only 5.1 remaster that I'd go out of my way to buy.
:woot:

 

[Omeletpants]

It's a shame that you cant have one system that's great for movies and music