5.1 music sells?

Surrounded

The hype of 5.1 and huger surround seems more active than ever... except in sales.
Back in the early days of Dolby Digital and DTS I stood up for releasing music in multi-channel formats. I still do.

The thing is just that I do not uphold the "Dolby Digital" or "DTS" 5.1, or 6.1 or whatever approach, it makes little sense to me, speaking in commercial terms, because of the comfort sacrifices it forces you to, when listening to it. Remember you may leave the music playing in the room and listen from the kitchen.

So, I think most people just won't go trough the trouble of buying a music "DVD" just by imagining sitting in the couch while it plays, exploring all the 5.1 surround activity. I speak for myself, having countless high-definition audio surround titles, I *only* listen to these in the former mentioned scenario, thus, rarely.


What do I think should be the way then?
Stereo still rules

No matter how much DVD players get lower in price, or compression algorithms get multichannel, the thing is that... The main thing is still the music, the thing you whistle too, tip the toes at with or get the goosebumps from.

Truth of the matter is that now matter how good people's Home-Cinema systems get, as far as music use is concerned, they will probably just stuff in a quite common normal audio CD in there, or SDCards or whatever.

The immersive surround makes more sense watching a movie or playing a game, not quite so listening to music which, some even just "display" for the neighbors, leaving the room due to very high volume, or dance away from the speakers, and I do mean away - not good for feeling immersive effects the producer wanted his 5.1 music to give you, which means, for that, you should stand in the geometrical center of all 5 or 6, or even 7 (for now) speakers...

... Ah, and have I mentioned that in many cases the speakers are incorrectly placed?

Encoding

So, to me, the solution, as far as investing in music audio production, still lies with the stereo approach as root, and... to add some value, if need be, the surround. Although there are a lot of ways you can do this, I use two (please mind that for HighDefinition content I use MLP and WMA lossless):

- Windows Media Audio Multichannel encoder (or similars)

- Dolby Prologic or similars

Sticking to the examples, Windows Media Audio allows you to encode several channels of audio but downmixes to stereo transparently if you are listening in stereo. Dolby Prologic, if version II, encodes a 5(.1) matrix into a stereo file, if IIx, goes up to 7.1, and altough the listener may enjoy it in stereo (with the hyped iPod, for example, and headphones) he can also, if in the mood, stuff the source into the Hi-Fi, turning on the suitable ProLogic decoder and getting the full 5(.1) channels from the stereo file or more.

There's some loss of quality doing phase encoding in a stereo file to get the extra surround channels, but, for the reasons stated above, some of which related to the kitchen/room scenario, that difference won't make that much of a difference.

Please notice the ".1" in all the stated cases, which is the sub-bass channel, is handled automatically, hence, removing bass from all channels, it's not a dedicated channel in ProLogic, but may be with Windows Media Audio.

Speaking of 5 channels surround, the problem with Windows Media Surround Encoder (and similars) is that, since they encode the whole channels, the file size is around, lets say, for sake of argument, bigger than a simple stereo would be (prologic is encoded in stereo) - not good for bandwidth (specially in high-quality, high bitrate versions).

On the other hand, if you had a stereo encoded Prologic II file, the size would be the simple stereo normal size, hence, around a few times less if you count off compression tricks, with all the channels there. Good for bandwidth, best for high bit rate encoding with no worries for size, and you can listen in an iPod or at home with your pride and joy home-cinema system in full 5.1, having downloaded a simple, small, ingenious simple stereo file.

Thus means, ProLogic is also good to burn straight on to a normal stereo CD...

My vote

So, you may have guessed it by now, my vote goes for plain stereo with encoded ProLogic information and that is probably my future orientation, if I don't stick with plain stereo - which would be option zero, the original vote, but I like to add value, and multi-channel does just that.

On the other hand, I uphold and defend HD multichannel (24bit/96khz) should be 5.1 in heart, engineered to be so with the highest of qualities, but only to be sold along side the standard material, for true apreciation - I'm not a suporter of compressed high-definition multichannel downloads, I want it all, linear, or, at most, 75% of it (WMA Q75 mode, similar to MiniDisc quality). :-)

The future

I believe the future may very well render effortless many hours of sweat some insist on going through to have a good 5.1 mix (many sound really lousy). The thing is that DSP (digital signal processing) will have such a huge amount of processing power that it will take any audio signal and do whatever it wants with it.

So, from a crappy mono feed, you may end up with a glorious 12.2 surround artificial but realistic environment, and move trough it in realtime, as with most games nowadays. So my moto is to focus on music, balance, production, emotion, and stereo, with optional spreading to a well mixed 5.1 (actually it's the reverse, but who cares) for marketing and personal pleasure reasons for, under all this reasoning, monophonic would be enough.

© Álvaro M. Rocha - All rights reserved