Mixing It With The Pros
Dear Gary:
I’m writing somewhat shocked and greatly appalled by what I read in Issue 106, March 2006, in the article “Mixing It With The Pros,” where, apparently, a panel of professional mixers denounced all forthcoming multichannel formats above 5.1 (and weren’t too happy about 5.1 at that) and failed to arrive at a useful consensus about standards for loudspeaker placement in either the mixing facility or the playback venue (home or cinema). As a motion picture director, I was aghast!
Filmmakers, and presumably sound mixers as well, consider themselves artists, and as such, at no point in this debate should the focus be on “discrete” sound sources or the requisite frequency range that a loudspeaker can produce, no! It should be about using sound to produce an immersive and realistic, fictional reality within a given space in our actual reality.
Nobody mentioned that for years SDDS has been using eight channels in movie theatres––not frivolously as unnecessary surround channels, but actually placing two additional channels behind the screen along with the L,C,R channels in order to produce better localization of objects and movement on the big screen. But the audience doesn’t care about localization, they care about their experience, and if an artist wants to use more channels to make that experience more realistic (and let’s face it, more competitive against the competition for the same limited number of eyes and ears), then far be it for the mixers to resist this evolution and grumble about what they deem to be “good enough.”
Technology in media has never been about what’s good enough. I still very much enjoy films shot in black and white, and listen to music that was recorded in mono. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t agree upon standards for artists and audiences who wish to experience more. Nobody on that panel mentioned that the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) accommodates a great number of “uncompressed” (whatever that means these days) channels in a variety of configurations, nor did they mention that Tomlinson Holman’s USC theatre has extra channels all over the place, including in the ceiling, all in an ongoing effort to make our movies and music sound more real and natural.
I’m afraid these aging mixers have to face facts: These extra channels are going to be there, people! Nobody says that you have to use them, but please, let’s at least devise some standards for how they should be consistently implemented in the work you do.
Jordan Livingston
mailto:jordanlivingston@gmail.com
Editor-In-Chief and Publisher Gary Reber Comments:
Jordan, thank you for driving home the point that whether the mixers on our 2006 Home Theater Cruise™ Technology At Sea Conference like it or not, the new formats will have extra channels. I attempted to focus the distinguished panel of recording engineers on the new HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc high-definition optical disc formats, which both specify full-frequency bandwidth delivered by eight uncompressed linear PCM discrete channels, and eight-channel delivery through Dolby® Digital•Plus and TrueHD, and DTS® HD and DTS HD Master Audio.
However, I do not agree with your stated position that “at no point in this debate should the focus be on ‘discrete’ sound sources or the requisite frequency range that loudspeakers can produce.” While enjoying the experience produced by the delivery equipment is not one of analytical awareness, in order to optimize the listening experience one does need to ensure that the equipment used is fully capable fidelity-wise and that the loudspeakers are positioned in the room relative to the sweet spot listening position to produce the intended “immersive and realistic, fictional reality within a given space...”
I believe that there is still so much education needed to educate the various divisions in the creative professional community and the end user consumer who wishes to optimize the intended experience produced for motion picture soundtracks, surround music, television, and video gaming. Tomlinson Holman is not the only one who is and has experimented with the use of discrete channels beyond the current 5.1 offering. And unless the creative professional communities in motion pictures, music, television, and video gaming don’t come together to arrive at a consensus for a new surround sound standard, then, as with the current confusion, the electronics manufacturers will continue to push “7.1” onto consumers as integral to their “the higher the number the better the marketing” strategy, even though there is no such production format.
Frankly, I don’t know how all of the creative interests—the manufacturers who make the necessary electronics and loudspeakers to reproduce sound, and the consumers—will ever sort this out. In the end, as is the current situation, we may just be left on our own, with different competing approaches marketed to the consumer who has no real idea of what should be the optimum system setup in their homes.
I would like to make clear that the purpose of the panel discussion was to discuss optimum setups, as the audience was already completely supportive of surround music. They wanted to know how to optimize their setups at home.
Contributing Editor John Kotches Comments: I sat in the audience
for the panel and converse via e-mail with a number of the panelists when reviewing their titles.
With respect to your first paragraph, it is important to note that all of the panelists, with the exception of Brant Biles and Robert Margouleff, work almost exclusively in the music arena. They do work on some concert videos as well, but it’s still from a “music-centric” perspective. Your characterization of denouncing formats above 5.1 is somewhat inaccurate. For most consumers, and most definitely for surround music, mixing to five loudspeakers is sufficient in their experience. There was a consensus for loudspeaker placement, with a range of 135 to 150 degrees for rear loudspeaker placement.
Let’s put that in context. Assuming equidistant placement at 10 feet from the sweet spot, each degree is barely over 1 inch. So we’re talking about a 15-inch difference to move between 135 and 150 degrees. That’s not a massive difference. Now to go from 135 to 110 is about two feet, which is a much bigger difference, and from 110 to 150 it’s over 3 feet. That’s a pretty big room if you have space for a 20-foot diameter loudspeaker setup for equidistant placement.
With paragraph two, you are discussing frequency ranges for loudspeakers. The NARAS recommendations are for Mixing Surround Sound titles, not for home reproduction. So, discussing frequency ranges when mixing these titles was a germane topic. Quoting Chuck Ainlay, “This is a recommendation for professionals mixing in a studio.” The minute you move it over to the home environment it becomes a different story.
In paragraph three you mention SDDS, which contains eight primary channels. It’s a movie format, and the five-across-the-front format, which is designed specifically for large venues where the screen is 40 feet or much more across. There, a trio of three loudspeakers doesn’t function very well, and SDDS’ five across the front addresses the problem quite handily. You’re dealing with a massive auditorium where you have a large number of listeners seated off axis (some dramatically so), which is an acoustic problem, which simply doesn’t exist in the home theatre environment. You don’t have to deal with filling a 15-foot (or larger) gap between L or R and C in this space, and as such it’s not a particularly apt example to select.
Why don’t we worry about getting every music disc mixed in 5.1 instead of getting the extra channels going? That seems like a reasonable starting point to me. Instead, as was pointed out, what’s actually happening is the number of surround projects is decreasing, which is not a positive direction for things to be going. You’re worried about how many channels are being used in the future. The panelists (and myself as well) are worried about surround music disappearing altogether. Could you tell me which is the greater problem to focus on? I’m of the mindset that making sure surround music doesn’t disappear altogether is a far more pressing concern than on expanding the number of channels being utilized.
In your fourth paragraph about technology in the media, you mentioned the Digital Cinema Initiative. These are all surround music mixers, and as such it wasn’t germane to the topic of discussion, ergo it wasn’t discussed. There is no hidden meaning to the word “uncompressed” in the context of the DCI, it means the bits are delivered as per the final mixdown, with no intermediate lossless compression involved. The DCI specification (page 18) calls for audio storage utilizing the .WAV format, which is an uncompressed and lossless file format. While it is true that the DCI has a vast number of channels in the specification (16), presently only eight, in the SDDS format, are defined. Please see pages 16 and 17 of the DCI specification for currently defined channel mapping. There are some suggested (potential) loudspeaker placements, which exceed the defined channel mappings, but they are not finalized placements nor have the channel assignments been published as part of the 1.0 specification.
Tomlinson Holman’s 10.2 system is not included in either next-generation media, so it will remain a demonstration item that won’t be available to the masses for at least another generation of media (or electronic distribution) beyond HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
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