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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.com

into 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%20mono

If 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




multichannel
canibefrank
406 posts
 
can you import two track stereo and export from VLC into 5.1 or 7.1?
multichannel OP
4 posts
 
Two stereo tracks have been mixed....5.1 has five channels - centre, left, right, outside left, outside right....

so if you put the stereo L and R channel into the 5.1 L and R you get back what you started with....the channels may be more separated but not the individual stems....if you were to take the stereo L and R and put them into L and R and also both into Centre, that might be interesting but it would merge them rather than separate them....I will try it but don't think there will be much difference....can report back
multichannel OP
4 posts
 
OK I did the mix of the Eagle's "Peaceful Easy Feeling" a few ways - I used Audacity to split the stereo into a mono left and a mono right, then placed them into a 6-speaker 5.1 configuration just to the L & R channels.

Another mix was to take the mono L and R and put them into the 5.1 left, outer left, right and outer right, with the L/R also going to the subwoofer.

Final mix was to add to the mono L and R tracks a duplicate stereo track at -10dB intended for the center 5.1 channel - #3....

The end result....no significant difference, except that five speakers plus a subwoofer produces more midranges than 2 speakers....and when I listened to them in stereo earphones, no difference at all, showing that 5.1 stereo is not so different from 2-channel stereo. However, 5-channel discrete mono certainly has different placements from 2-channel stereo.

It's not possible to isolate each instrument from the melange that a mixed stereo track represents. Not by me, anyway, and I think AI will be a long way from doing that cleanly.

BTW, in order to use Audacity for AC3, you have to download the FFMPEG library dll, and then in Audacity's preferences for mixing, choose CUSTOM mix. Otherwise you get just stereo. This is well known, and any search on the Internet with the terms "Audacity AC3" will lead one to the exact details of how to and where to download.
canibefrank
406 posts
 
i was wondering if you can do any groovy audio majik mixes with Audacity with a source stereo program... I guess similar to what the home theater Dolby Logic Pro does to stereo tracks by synthesizing the center channel..... probably better to let the pre-amp of an HT unit handle the processing


maxxzaxx
1 posts
 
Well you have cleared my doubts.  I have been playing with stem songs for assisted singing and performance on stage when I experimented with surround sound and had this idea you called Soundstage. The surround we have on sacd and blu rays are mixed and not discrete and the technology tends to bring the listener in the middle of the stage... whereas all the recording studios and audiophiles try to reproduce the song as a live event or something played live as in a studio. If we truly reproduce as it were recorded then your concept of soundstage is truer than surround tech.  Like you mentioned, the number of speakers may not be limited to 5.1,..theoretically, the number of speakers should be equal to the number of instruments and voices recorded discretely.  This concept is REVOLUTIONARY as you have termed and I am joining the bandwagon.  Thanks a lot.
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