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Originally Posted by Timsplace  I'd take surround if it were 3.1! Having a "Real" center as apposed to a Phantom center is a beautiful thing. |
How about 3.0? There's all that RCA Living Stereo and Mercury Living Presence stuff being reissued in the original (i.e. as recorded) 3-channel format on SACD. I've just been listening to the classic Fritz Reiner recording of Dvorak's New World Symphony. What a great performance!
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My biggest issue with surround is the crappy downmix. You go to all this trouble to create an amazing space and (in my world anyway-live TV) most peoplestill listen to the fold-down of the 5.1. Those spacious 5.1 reverbs get summed to mud. If you have to deal with the fold down to stereo (as apposed to a remixed stereo) it puts a bit of a limit to what you can do in your mix.
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OK, but that's only an issue with
some surround. You can have control over the downmix parameters in DTS, for instance. DVD's can have a separate stereo stream. Virtually every SACD I see anymore is a dual-layer disc, with a regular stereo mix on the CD layer.
I just bought that interesting Zenph "re-performance" of Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations on a Sony hybrid SACD (Amazon link
here).
No downmix problems of any sort. I put it in my DVD player, and I hear surround. I put it in my friend's Prius, and I hear stereo. There's even a binaural version on there, which I suppose is intended to be put on your iPod. It all sounds stunning.
My impression is that a lot of us are trying to produce surround and stereo mixes as part of the same mix process. The details of making that happen depend on your particular DAW or console, but there's usually a way. (High profile projects can budget for a separate mix, of course. But most of us who are doing surround are trying to figure out how to do it cost-effectively, which means a lot of the stereo work is happening simultaneously.) So taking it as given that a good stereo mix exists, getting it to the consumer is basically a disc authoring issue.
David L. Rick
Seventh String Recording