The concept of placing the speakers in positions based on a listening circle was established subwoofers provided the 'point one', and then innovation was simply a case of adding more and more satellite speakers to reach 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 10.2.ĭesigned by the inventor of THX, the 10.2 format is claimed to be 'twice as good as 5.1' and includes two channels for height. Or didn't.įrom the '80s onwards came a succession of surround formats that readers may be more familiar with: Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Digital, DTS and so on. (The Soundfield microphone is based on Ambisonics and can record 360degree surround sound onto four tracks.) Ambisonics' failure has been attributed to its being promoted by the British governmentfunded National Research and Development Council - the same people who brought you the hovercraft. Endlessly adaptable, the system can incorporate any number of speakers, in almost any positions. Ambisonics is genuinely brilliant - it's still arguably the most accurate and versatile way to record and reproduce a 3D soundfield, and can even reproduce height. Next came Ambisonics, again born in the '70s and still popular among some audiophiles and academics. It can give some good effects, but it's not proper surround sound. But Quad was never going to accurately reproduce a 3D soundfield anyway, due to a basic flaw in the maths: four speakers placed in the corners of a room cannot produce the 'phantom images' that stereo or 5.1 can. But there was no agreement between manufacturers on standardising the system technical difficulties and conflicting formats meant that very few people felt confident enough to buy into it, and so Quad died. The Quadraphonic system, launched in 1970, was implemented beautifully: to record four synchronous audio tracks onto a vinyl record is no mean achievement. Over the last 40 years, a succession of brilliant innovations have arrived with fanfares - then faded away to public indifference.
The story of surround sound in the home has so far been one of heroic failure. Yet since its 2005 launch, it has been largely ignored by the music industry and the media - who, quite justifiably, think they've heard this before. MP3 Surround could eventually transform the way we listen to music, and it probably will. There's also a binaural option for playing 5.1 on stereo headphones, so you don't even need surround speakers. The idea behind HeadRelated Transfer Functions is to mimic the spatial cues that tell us where a sound is coming from.It's free, it can compress 5.1 surround files down to almost the size of a stereo MP3, the sound quality is excellent and there's a plugin for Winamp.
That could be about to change.Ī properly set-up surround speaker system allows the listener to localise sound from all directions. Until now, huge file sizes and the need for dedicated equipment have prevented the distribution of surround mixes over the Internet.
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