OK, bear in mind that i'm quite a novice at mixing:
I'm a big fan of the flaming lips. a while back they did an album, Zaireeka, that involves 4 cds that are meant to be played simultaneously meaning you get kind of 8 speaker surround sound.
so i thought i'd experiment, but have a go at a 2 cd thing, meaning rudimentary 4 speaker surround, i.e. front L and R, back L and R. it's not going to be very musical, but i figure i can learn a lot about mixing and stuff. i'm doing this on cubase on two speakers, so it takes a lot of planning what's going front and back. but then i get to the problem of relative levels between the two. which is where i can maybe get some advice from you good people.
what it comes down to is: if you take a sound, a pure sine, for example, that is synthesised at -6db from soundforge. play it out of total left speaker it sounds just so. stick the same sound out of right speaker at the same time, you have to reduce both by 3db so -9db is coming out of both speakers, giving the same overall loudness - i learnt this from a rudimentary psychology of hearing module that reduction by 3db means a half in perceived loudness, so one sound source at xdb is the same as x-3db coming from two sources.
so: if the same sound is coming from four speakers, am i right in thinking i need to reduce all four sound sources by 12db - 4x3 - in order to get the same apparent loudness overall. i'm asking for some advice - or some pointers towards websites/books that deal with this stuff - because in order to test this thing out i need to mix 2cdrs - front and back, to test it out, and to continually keep doing so would be pretty expensive overall.
any thoughts, advice, or pointers would be greatly appreciated. especially if someone tells me that to start such a project is a bit stupid since i've not done much in the past :-
cheers
I'm a big fan of the flaming lips. a while back they did an album, Zaireeka, that involves 4 cds that are meant to be played simultaneously meaning you get kind of 8 speaker surround sound.
so i thought i'd experiment, but have a go at a 2 cd thing, meaning rudimentary 4 speaker surround, i.e. front L and R, back L and R. it's not going to be very musical, but i figure i can learn a lot about mixing and stuff. i'm doing this on cubase on two speakers, so it takes a lot of planning what's going front and back. but then i get to the problem of relative levels between the two. which is where i can maybe get some advice from you good people.
what it comes down to is: if you take a sound, a pure sine, for example, that is synthesised at -6db from soundforge. play it out of total left speaker it sounds just so. stick the same sound out of right speaker at the same time, you have to reduce both by 3db so -9db is coming out of both speakers, giving the same overall loudness - i learnt this from a rudimentary psychology of hearing module that reduction by 3db means a half in perceived loudness, so one sound source at xdb is the same as x-3db coming from two sources.
so: if the same sound is coming from four speakers, am i right in thinking i need to reduce all four sound sources by 12db - 4x3 - in order to get the same apparent loudness overall. i'm asking for some advice - or some pointers towards websites/books that deal with this stuff - because in order to test this thing out i need to mix 2cdrs - front and back, to test it out, and to continually keep doing so would be pretty expensive overall.
any thoughts, advice, or pointers would be greatly appreciated. especially if someone tells me that to start such a project is a bit stupid since i've not done much in the past :-
cheers
