mastering and surround sound

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peterkern23

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Hi,

Just a quickie:

have had a track mastered professionally, sounds fine on stereo and in car headphones etc, but when i play it through surround sound 5:1 it sounds very different - the main track sounds like it is heavily reverbed and the panned drums are very prominent in the mix. Is this normal for surround sound?

Thanks,

Pete
 
If that's a stereo track mastered in and for stereo, your "surround" sound is being synthesized by your playback system, and your at it's mercy as to how any given stereo mix is going to sound synthed that way. You may have different "surround" decoder settings on your playback device allowing you to choose different surround schemes, but that's about it.

G.
 
As long as we're on the subject, use the tool...

Play some recordings that you're very familiar with that you also know are "really good" recordings through the same system and see if it affects them in the same manner.

Surround emulation systems (damn them...) can either be totally DSP driven - adding reverb and delay, skewing phase, etc.) or simply taking what's there and 'moving' it around (like Dolby Pro Logic, which more or less takes out of phase information in a certain bandwidth and shoves it to the rears).

Some are just "adding effects" and others are doing what they're doing based on the program material they're given. If *your* recording sounds different than a typical "off the shelf" recording, try to figure out *why* it sounds different. Are your drums panned all weird? Is there excessive phase cancellation? Are you using four times the amount of reverb?

Just things to consider.


Granted - If we're talking about some "Dark Cathedral" setting on a home stereo, I'm assuming that everything sounds like sh*t on it anyway...
 
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