5.1 audiophile listening with repurposed home theater into a Sound Stage using VLC
I created a sound stage for 5.1 using balanced speakers arranged in a row and a home theatre receiver, with a subwoofer. The music is streamed from my website
http://discretemono.cominto VLC, and consists of about 40 pieces of music that I mixed with Audacity from the multi-track projects into Dolby 5 channels and coded into .AC3. These projects are from the non-profit UK site
http://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms-mtk.htm
and my website is not sponsored, is free, and is all personally paid for. It's all about experimenting and spreading the word. The mixing graphs are associated with each piece on
http://discretemono.com.
The sound that comes from the mono channels is open, with great clarity, and spatial to a degree that the sweet spot of stereo aspires to but does not match. Yet this mix is done by point and click in a few seconds, and encoded in less than a minute.
The streamed .AC3 files have a spatial quality that even comes across in stereo - listen on headphones, and compare the discrete mono mixed Dead Roses by Andrew Cole with the youtube mixes. You will be amazed - stereo mixes are so different from the open, spatial and transparent multi-channel mix.
I have more information about this in medium.com:
https://medium.com/search?q=discrete%20monoIf you go so far as to repurpose your speakers to a sound stage, and visit discretemono.com, and listen to some of the mixes, may I recommend: dead roses (acoustic folk), milk cow blues (country), heart peripheral (techno), that's entertainment (musical chorus), and Mozart (classical).
I am part of a coming revolution in audiophile listening, streamed from the Internet, but to make it happen, the big companies that own the music will have to re-mix them for Dolby 5 or Dolby 7, and the concept of the sound stage may find a solution different from five wired speakers.
I welcome your experience and comments......thank you, please send to discrete.mono@gmail.com
ps
There is streaming AC3 music in jazzgroove.com which has no selection, and tidal.com has 5.1 music in its pay for play portfolio. I find that the loudness wars have won in many of these, and the nature of the sound is again different from what you get by using discrete mono to redirect the stems into channels. So you decide what you would prefer, and you would find Mark Waldrep's blog on this very interesting:
http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=4443