Why don't they record in ‘surround stereo’?


Surround sound can sound wonderful on your home theater system if the recording is done well. Unfortunately, a quality home theater movie soundtrack recording streamed at home is not so good due to bandwidth problems and not a top priority from movie creators unfortunately

And maybe for stereo listening connoisseurs, via records or streaming, it may be nice to hear Music delivered to rear speakers in  the room rather than just from the two main speakers. And yes main speakers can do an excellent job spreading pressure amplitudes evenly throughout the room with good amplification and room acoustics but maybe it could get better.

Possibly might it be more interesting if current stereo recordings could be recorded in surround stereo. Not sure how taboo or how awful this would be if done well. Stereo is a relic of the past it may be worth upgrading a bit, and maybe rethinking how music is recorded and delivered in current Times might be worth exploring. 

emergingsoul

There are now hundreds of Dolby Atmos remixes of classic stereo recordings. It’s not generally understood that Atmos is a superset of Dolby Digital 5.1, and Atmos content will be automatically down mixed with no loss of fidelity to 5.1 if the AVR does not support Atmos.

My setup is: AppleTV 4K -> HDMI -> Marantz AV8003 pre/pro -> Marantz MM8003 power amp -> 5.1 speakers. This receiver dates back to 2010, long before Atmos, but the AppleTV automatically sends discrete, uncompressed 5.1 channel PCM to the AVR. Sure enough, the Atmos mixes play back perfectly in 5.1 surround, and are quite different than the 2-channel mixes. And there are hundreds of titles in Apple Music in Atmos format ... some new, some going back to the late Sixties, like The Doors.

True, the quality of the mixes vary, as it always has for surround sound. Some are very much better than the stereo release, and others are gimmicky and not very good. But most are an improvement on the stereo version, which are only a few clicks away if you prefer that.

Apple Music lets you choose tracks in several formats: 44.1/16 CD resolution in stereo, 96/24 resolution in stereo, and Dolby Atmos, which appears on the faceplate of the receiver as 5.1 PCM Discrete (not Dolby Digital). Based on the display, it is the AppleTV, not the receiver, that is decoding the Atmos stream and converting it to uncompressed PCM streams.

@lynn_olson 

Yeah I mostly see uncompressed PCM which my NAD processor calls ‘Direct’ and that’s mostly what I see these days. And I’m fine with that.

YouTube videos with music tend to be better in stereo as it mangles things when some of the signal flows through the center speaker at times. A lot of the music through YouTube is pretty darn good. That’s interesting Apple allows you to change formats but I’ve never drifted into Appleland. Unfortunately roon does not do that as far as I know. Or maybe it does in some of their DSP crap which I tend to stay away from.

 

Outside of a motion picture auditorium it is really hard to convince consumers to buy more than 2 speakers.  They just don't care enough.

roxy54 wrote:

By the way, "surround stereo" is a mismomer @emergingsoul . Stereo by definition is 2 channel.

That is not correct. The term "stereo" derives from the Greek word for "solid" and is applied to reproduction by 2 or more channels.

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