It's Everywhere
We've all experienced the sudden sense of euphoria and excitement that can come from a great surround sound system. Suddenly reality seems suspended and a new world seems to drop into place. The senses of sight and sound come together to overwhelm the brain, tricking it into momentarily thinking that the theater may have come crashing down, replaced by the scene playing out in front of the audience. Achieving full suspension of disbelief is difficult without surround sound as even the most realistic and detailed audio recording can seem flat and distant if played through an old-fashioned two-speaker setup, and the recreation of theater-quality surround sound is a goal which many home theater enthusiasts pursue with open wallets.
But how does surround sound work? It seems like a simple enough question, as one would (correctly) assume that surround sound systems operate by surrounding the audience with multiple sources of audio. This is basically true, but there is much more at work. The best surround systems are technological works of art, and the experience they create goes beyond simply placing a few speakers in a circle around an audience.
The Basics
A person listening to a standard stereo is hearing a multi-channel recording which is created (ideally) by placing two different microphones in a recording area to replicate two human ears. This is a decent form of recording for music in particular, as the concert experience tends to focus on facing towards on specific area in a large venue. For movies, however, stereo sound cannot suspend disbelief and trick the audience into feeling the sounds are real. In life, after all, sounds come from all directions. Stereo sound is flat and vague in comparison.
As one might expect, recording surround sound is simply an extension of the stereo concept. Rather than trying to replicate human ears, however, special surround sound recording equipment is used to record a full range of sounds coming from numerous different areas. This is an effective method recording for certain kinds of music such as symphonies taking place in a concert hall. In such a venue the acoustics of the concert hall are extremely important, and recreating the experience requires the ability to record more than the sounds coming straight from the stage. Of course, in today's age of digital media, the idea of recording a movie and presenting it in surround sound by simply using some sort of specialized microphone is fairly quaint. This is particularly true in films that use a lot of CGI or animated elements. There is, of course, no Optimus Prime and so no Optimus Prime sounds to record.
In either the case of a surround sound recorded using a special microphone or fabricated in a sound studio, all surround sound is delivered through the use of channels. Each channel consists of audio that can be mapped to a specific speaker or set of speakers. A stereo set up is usually two-channel because each speaker can deliver different sound than the other. A 5.1 channel system has left and right speakers in the front and rear and one center front speaker. The .1 stands for the Low Frequency Effects channel, a channel which is developed to deal with sub-bass effects. This channel is not dedicated to any particular speaker.
How Surround Sound Works?
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