TMH Delivers Surround Music SuperSession At CES

18-Jan-01

TMH Corporation recently led a highly successful Surround Music SuperSession starring musical artists Herbie Hancock and Peter DiStefano at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Joining the artists were TMH's Tomlinson Holman, Bob Ludwig of Gateway Mastering and Bjorn Dybdahl of Bjorn's Audio Video from San Antonio, Texas. The entire chain of creating, mastering and selling surround music to the public was covered by the presenters. The room was filled to capacity, and more than 20 percent of those seeking to attend were turned away, including some members of the press. TWICE gave the SuperSession front page coverage, entitled ""Surround Sound Roundtable Wows Attendees.""""It was [the] musicians who waxed most euphoric over the advent of multichannel sound and affordable digital recording gear... Herbie Hancock, the star attraction, developed a thesis of the new impact of surround-sound possibilities on the creation of music,"" as quoted from the coverage. ""Surround sound is the 'catalyst for compositional ideas,' said Hancock, who is 'interested in breaking down the cultural and genre barriers.' To the cheers of the crowd, Hancock said that in 'our immersive sonic world, stereo is unnatural, surround is natural... [and] the more channels the better.í""During the event, 10.1-channel sound was demonstrated with, among other things, a remix of the Herbie Hancock tune ""Butterfly."" Mr. Hancock first presented the two-channel CD mix, then the component parts of the final mix spatialized over the multichannel sound system, and finally the complete mix. There was an audible sigh from the audience when the system switched from two channel to multichannel space.David Ranada, well-known reviewer from Sound And Vision magazine said, ""During the presentation I attended, jazz great Herbie Hancock gave a short talk about how multichannel sound can be a boon for musicians. Some of his statements were music to my ears, since they reflected what I've been saying for years and what some listeners still find hard to believe. It's nice to hear from a leading musician such statements as 'stereo is unnatural, surround is natural,' and 'the more channels, the better.' He cited some of his own stereo work that was too sonically complex to fit comfortably within a two speaker medium and demonstrated a 10.2-channel remix of one of his tracks that stunned all in the audience with its beauty and musicality."" (the demonstrations were actually 10.1-channel) Accompanying the SuperSession for four days of the CES were ongoing demonstrations of 10.1-channel audio. The main demonstration was already well-reviewed from a DSP World presentation by Kim Wilson, including the presentation of natural spaces as well as music.""The term 'breathtaking' hardly conveys the level of realism this demonstration delivers. This is as close to live as Iíve ever heard from a reproduced sound source. Yes, the instruments sound wonderful, natural and pure, but it is the perfect and accurate simulation of acoustics and ambience that convinces your mind that you are in a completely different environment,"" said Wilson.For CES, the demonstrations were widened to include a multichannel staging of a Shakespeare play, a marching band and concert recordings of Beethoven's 4th Symphony and Mahler's 8th, adding to the 10.1-channel catalog. Participating in the demonstration were a number of supporting organizations. On the production side, these included the Immersive Sound Laboratory of the Integrated Media Systems Center at USC and Audio Rents of Hollywood, California. Building the large reproduction system took the combined efforts of TMH, Bryston, PMC, Tesseract, Whise and CE. The recordings were all prepared in the studio at the University of Southern California and delivered on hard discs to Las Vegas, Nevada. A Pro Tools system played the files back through a TMH 10.1-channel Bass Manager, a set of Rane equalizers, many Bryston power amplifiers and several different speaker types. The main LCR speakers were PMC/Bryston BB5 actives, and LS/RS MB-1s. The additional channels beyond 5.1 are left and right wide which reproduce one of the most important directions for first reflections from side walls in concert halls, left and right high which deliver a three-dimensional sensation by breaking the stereo plane, and back surround, which is already well established in quasi-6.1-channel formats. These five additional channels used PMC MB-1 type loudspeakers.The Tesseract loudspeaker is a three-way, tri-amplified design used in premium dubbing stages and screening rooms. In this case, two sets of the speakers were installed back to back in the left diffuse surround and right diffuse surround position and wired to produce a dipole response pattern. These are practically coincident with the direct radiating LS/RS speakers, offering the producer of the recording a choice between point source and diffuse radiating surrounds. Both types were used at various points during the demonstrations, with the diffuse type predominating for natural direct-ambient-style presentations, and the direct radiators for effects desired to be localized at the speaker locations.The Whise subwoofer 616 provided the energy for all of the channels between 16 and 25Hz. Some of the demo material had significant content well below 25Hz, and stimulated the audience with nearly 2/3 of an octave lower than most people had ever heard before. It also played the Low Frequency Effects channel content up to 120Hz. The subwoofer is capable of 125dB SPL at 1m and 16Hz.The recording technique, microphone, preamplifiers and converters are covered in an ongoing series of articles in Surround Professional magazine, Tomlinson Holman, Founding Editor.For more information about TMH Corporation, visit www.tmhlabs.com.

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