Mixing in Surround

[gianelli280]

I recently picked up a new set of monitors, which leaves me with a total of 4. well, 4.1 including the sub, which leaves me with the opportunity to try mixing in surround. Has anyone ever used this to collapse down to stereo or does that sort of defeat the purpose of mixing? It seems like it would be fun to try anyway...

 

[Mo Facta]

You really should only mix in surround (or, quadraphonic in your case) if the material is going to be played on a surround sound system by the end user, such as in a film or a 5.1 music DVD. There is no benefit to mixing in surround and then folding down to stereo. Granted, this is done when a 5.1 production is released in stereo, say, for broadcast, but it is never done as a matter of course for "more betterness".

Also, it is likely that you'll need a 5.1 monitor controller. Do you have one? You might be able to set up a software controller in your DAW (Cubase, for instance, has a control room mixer which supports surround monitoring), but this means your main volume control is going to be within the software and that can be troublesome.

Other than all that, I can't see any harm in experimenting in mixing in surround for the sake of interest. You'll need somewhere to audition your mixes (like a properly configured home theater) and you'll need to be able to author either a 5.1 music DVD or, if your player does not support this, encode the audio to a video so that the encoded audio is picked up by the AC3 codec in the player and is truly represented in surround. This is not as easy as it sounds, believe me.

Cheers

 

[gianelli280]

I can imagine it would be a hassle to pull off. This is strictly out of curiosity, and I doubt any of the material will ever leave my 'studio.' I use cubase, but I don't plan on even exporting anything out of the program itself (which I doubt I'd be able to figure out anyways!).

My mixer has stereo out and sub out, which both have right and left outputs, and can be assigned within cubase, so i'll give that a shot.

I figured it would be pretty useless to mix from 4 to 2.

 

[Guitargodgt]

I went to a short presentation at school where the presentation was mixing in surround. (Holophone.com and Discwelders put it on).

Things I remember:

1. All of your speakers need to be the same. It's better to have 5 piece of shit speakers that are all the same vs. 3 shitty speakers and one nice set.
2. Placement is important.
3. There are no rules or standards in surround, so label your ch if someone else is going to mix (not that it's applicable if your doing it all).
4. There are no rules for studio mixes (non live stuff) and there isn't that many rules for live mixes either. He showed stuff that had the vocals in the surround speakers and other stuff where the center ch was kick only. Basically do what you want.
5. Ideally an spl meter to calibrate all the monitors.


That's all I remember, I took notes but I can't seem to find them. The presentation was only a few hours long anyway.