An Introduction to the making of surround sound from stereo

After being taught to be a listener for so long, I became a little bit  impatient to hear so many of the exciting surround mixes placing the music sources in unrealistic spatial relationship. For example, you can enjoy the 5.1 mix in dts or Dolby Digital with exciting surround sound in the "Black and White Night" DVD Video by the good old respectful Roy Orbison. However, you get a very annoying discrepancy between the visual image and audio image. You see the backing vocalists on the right side and the violists behind the band but you hear the string and backing voices coming from your surround speakers (placed at the back or on the sides). This kind of 5.1 mixes can be found very often in the commercial DVD Video. However, for DVD Audio, because there is no visual image, one can enjoy the mix engineer's audio plan without much pain...but it is still a matter when logically you should hear the backing vocalist from the front rather than singing discretely from your back...when you know that the DVD Audio you are listening now is a live concert.

So, what? As a listener, you can shut your hear by throwing away the discs you dislike. Or you can choose the stereo mix as an alternative. For me, I'd try to make my own 5.1 mix from the original source. A very simple approach is to derive a 5.1 surround mix from the stereo source. Imagine that you are now sitting in a concert hall, sound from the front stage blow in from front to your face and bounces back from behind and around with various degree of attenuation in different ranges of frequency spectrum according to the acoustic environment. You actually hear 2 kinds of sounds. (1)Direct sound from the front stage (2)Surround sound from around you. It is my job to generate the surround tracks and place them in the surround speakers with minor change of the original direct sound from the front speakers (I mean, adding a center channel). This can be accomplished easily now with some of the software sound editors/mixers without counting on the hardware. For example, the surround sound capable Panhandler plug-in, Mx51, and ACID Pro etc, can help you do the job much easier than the stereo sound editor such as Cooledit Pro. Here is my approach:

(1)Get the stereo. If the original source is mono, turn it into stereo with Cooledit Pro first.

(2)Choose the acoustic environment suitable for generating the surround tracks (live concert should be reverb from various kinds of "concert hall"). Club or studio sound would need only a "warm ambience" or "small/medium room" environment.

(3)Generate from the stereo source the surround tracks (reverb + delay).

(4)Add the center and LFE (low frequency effect) tracks to fulfill the 5.1 mix.

(5)Adjust the sound pressure levels among the 6 channels and output them into 3 stereo files or 6 mono files in order to feed into the surround sound encoder.

This can be done by careful planning with a few initial tests and set for the final batch job for a group of songs. With Cooledit Pro, you can get the job done with the "Scripts & batch processing" method. However, it is very tedious compared to the surround sound capable software such as ACID Pro. I won't go into detail in this introduction but it is the principle that matters. The above 5 steps should tell all. This approach generates a more natural but not so exciting surround mix compared to the commercial products, however, it eases my ears without pain.

Go to: Making 5.1 Surround from Stereo Source with ACID Pro 4.0