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We have two ears, so most of the psychoacoustic effects we experience in real life are achieved by just stereo recordings. Stereo listening also mimics the effect of standing in front of the stage at a live performance. You don't have performers on your back in real life. Also, stereo has a sweet spot, meaning that you only get to experience it properly when standing at the right distance in front of two speakers. Surround is similar in this way. All the other positions cancel almost all effects and it might as well be monophonic and we wouldn't notice.

So, while surround is interesting, it is not practical, the amount of mixing work needed is increased exponentially and for very little gain over stereo other than satisfying a very narrow audience. It's mostly a marketing gimmick in my opinion and a reason to sell hardware.

Add this to the fact that almost every equipment and technology since the discovery of stereo is designed to just handle stereo, I don't see us shifting to surround anytime soon. Binaural actually has a far better surround effect than surround audio. And it's in stereo.

1 comments

>We have two ears, so most of the psychoacoustic effects we experience in real life are achieved by just stereo recordings.

That isn't quite true. Ears have no problem hearing up/down and front/back information.

Conventional stereo doesn't include those details. Alternative systems like Ambisonics do.

The real reason stereo is so popular is practicality. Two channels are more affordable and easy to distribute than six or twelve.

Even when people buy 5.1 surround, they usually compromise with dinky satellites and a big sub.

No-compromise surround certainly makes a difference, but for most people it's just not worth the extra money/space. It's a problem of diminishing aesthetic returns.

In fact you can get incredible positional effects out of multi-speaker systems that live in university engineering labs. But they're totally impractical for consumer use.

>That isn't quite true. Ears have no problem hearing up/down and front/back information.

>Conventional stereo doesn't include those details. Alternative systems like Ambisonics do.

Ears don't hear up/down and front/back. Ears hear left and right. The _brain_ uses information from tiny deviations of the sound which are caused by your head being in the way and then decodes it as being up/down and front/back.

This is what binaural sound is about, meaning, if you record in stereo something using earplug microphones, then listen to that recording using earplug headphones, those tiny deviations are present in that stereo recording and it'll cause your brain to determine the position of the sound source using that information. It's a psychoacoustic effect, like the reverb tells our brain the room characteristics a sound is played in. We don't actually need to be inside that room to playback a sound, we just add the reverb, the effect is good enough for our brains.

To me, the whole surround audio for consumers is a marketing gimmick because you can never get good enough and they can always keep selling newer and bigger speaker setups. The only adequate setup would be an anechoic spherical room, you sitting at the center and speakers in every direction possible. Surround as it is now has some practical use in motion pictures and mostly cinemas, to give you a somewhat feeling you're in the action, but it's not actually proper surround.

>Ears don't hear up/down and front/back.

Actually the shape of the ears enhances that extra information. So it's not just psychoacoustic processing, and ears are not just wetware microphones.

>To me, the whole surround audio for consumers is a marketing gimmick

That's because Ambisonics - which hardly anyone has heard of now - never made it into the consumer mainstream. Of all possible surround systems, it's by far the best - precisely because done well, it can encode up/down and front/back information in a small number of channels.

Conventionally audio engineers won't try for above/back of head sounds in stereo but they're possible (samples exist online), if you're wearing headphones or standing in the exact intended position.