DTS Neo.X - Page 7

In that 3DAA slide deck the diagram on page 3 is one way to configure 11.1 speakers. On page 6 the bottom picture shows 4 of the 6 height speakers in the ARL (audio research lab) at SRS, two being lateral to the listening area, and two being behind. It's all open for discussion at this point.

The advantage in having spaced pairs of height speakers straddling the listening area is they can work together to create either phantom images or diffuse images, or even a circular pan overhead.

One of the nice things about the MDA format 3DAA is advocating is that it does not dictate speaker locations. The end user decides where to put them, and the decoder adapts accordingly. If there a single TopSurround speaker directly overhead, it will use it.

Hi Derek,

It's been a long time since I experimented, but yes I was surprised to hear dialog when connected between the surround channels. By all means give it a try. As I mentioned others have liked the effect.

With regard to what DSX calls height speakers, as you probably know Audyssey recommends placing the heights speaker on the front wall at 45 degrees both in azimuth and elevation with respect to the main listening position. However, in discussing practical mounting consideration constraints at the Audyssey thread, the founder and Chief Technical Officer of Audyssey stated that if it was not possible to place heights at the correct angles above the mains on the front wall, that in-ceiling speakers could be used near the front wall. Those in-ceiling speakers with aim-able tweeters were recommended for this application.

Anyway the point is that DSX height speakers are not strictly confined to the front walls, they can be mounted in the ceiling.

Larry

The correct vector would definitely be more important than sitting on the front wall. The problem with it is that with normal ceiling heights (8 feet here in Sweden), 45 degrees up will put them very close to the seating area which may give problems with relative distance and also put some demands on off-axis response.

Hi,

The purpose of my comment was to respond to Derek's suggestion that when discussing height speakers that we should try to designate them into one of two categories, front wall or ceiling/overhead. Although according to Audyssey DSX height speakers are intended to be mounted on the front wall they also accept the real-world fact that this my not be feasible and do not have a problem with ceiling mounting. Therefore, it may not be accurate to strictly classify DSX height speakers as front wall types.

With regard to your remarks, it is true with limited ceiling height, placement of in-ceiling height speakers at the correct vector can take them closer to the seating than Audyssey would recommend. They do point out that MultEQ will nevertheless set the correct delay to mitigate this close speaker situation. If the tweeters can be pointed to the primary seating location there should not be any undue off-axis problems.

So in summary in absence of high ceilings we have the option of mounting the speakers on or near the front wall, but compromising the ideal vector. Or conversely if we maintain the proper vector the speakers may be mounted closer to the seating than the ideal. I tend to agree with your statement that maintaining the proper vector might be the lesser or the two evils, but I am guessing since I don't have a DSX setup yet.

Even with ideal room dimensions the problem with any of Audyssey's recommended ideal placement guidelines for the both the heights and wides is that members of the audience who are not seated in the primary seating location never are ideally situated. Of course this is not a unique situation to home theater, folks not seated in the primary seating location will not have the ideal delay setting nor the ideal level setting. Its all about trade-offs and compromises.

Larry

Agreed. If we think of the idealized listening space as a ("unit radius") hemisphere centered on the MLP, then, at least nominally, (most) upper layer speakers should lie along a circle, all points of which are elevated (say) 45° [above the horizontal floor plane] when viewed from the MLP. But real-world room shape usually dictates that few speakers can be placed at their "ideal" location! [Even in this test lab (graphic not photo) only eight of nine upper layer speakers were actually placed 'on the surface of the hemisphere'.]

How would this work with dipoles? I love my radio shack
LX5 IIs, got 16 of them. How well would they work with 9.1
or 11.1?

How do they radiate on-axis?
* If they have a normal level, they are fine for all fronts, including high and wide.

* If they have a dip due to tweeters cancelling eachother directly on-axis - they would make good surround and surround backs... and then I'd recommend using multiple per channel - if you have a huge room 5+3+3+5 configuration would make use of all 16.

I've found omnipole/dipole based speakers to give too diffused a soundstage, it cancels out any directionality in wide or height speakers.

My experience with omnipolar speakers and dsx wides has been positive. I'm running
ohm walsh 3000's and mirage fs2's. I get a soundstage that stretches from side wall to
side wall,with good depth and good imaging. It could be something unique to my system,
but it works well for me.

I guess I'll give it a try. The LX 5's really give a nice sound stage for music, plus the sweet spot for movies is pretty wide. The freq response is pretty raggy, but with my Pioneer (it has the 1st gen of MCAAC) the equalization really woke them up.

Just getting back to you guys to say that my ponderings have come to an end and I've decided to give Neo:X (and DSX) a miss at this point and go with a Pioneer. It's called LX-73 over here and I think that is the same as your Elite SC-35. It went down a bit in price now that the new models will arrive in slightly over a month's time so it just made sense so stick to that one. Half the price compared to the Denon 4311 + AudysseyPro mic.... seems quite a steal. And that's not counting what 4 extra speakers would cost to implement.

Thanks for all the feedback.

Just FYI, the LX75 and LX85 coming this fall will both include DTS Neo:X.

AJ

Yes, I know. But they have new power amps and also lower effect per channel... plus they have introduced selectable filters for the DACs which 'turns me off'.

LX73 got hooked up last night and I had a small test with Avatar 5dB below Ref... which is quite loud enough for me.

Quite fun to use the iPhone as remote too.

And I got the LX-73 at 2/3 of what the 75 will cost and probably around half the price of an 85. I can definitely use that money better on a poweramp for new subwoofers and perhaps an antimode.

Hi all,

The characteristics of the new Onkyo TX NR3009/5009 and PR SC5509 can be found here.

Unfortunately no DTS Neo X 11.x, as these products seem to be limited to a "simple" 9.x processing... with the usual combination 5.1 + (W + H) or (W + Rears) or (H + Rears)...

Hugo

A likely explanation might be that after selecting the "best" 9.x configuration (i.e., 7.x_Standard+2xFrontHeight or 7.x_Standard+2xFrontWide or 5.x_Standard+2xFrontHeight+2xFrontWide) for any given soundtrack, 'test panelists' did not hear a sufficient improvement in the upmix from an 11.x configuration (i.e., 7.x_Standard+2xFrontHeight+2xFrontWide) which would warrant the cost|weight|wattage penalty of adding two more power amps to the top models.

Instead of all this matrix post-processing BS... why not start mixing a lot more movies with really high quality 24 bit, discrete 7.1 surround instead?

Now that 7.1 has made in-roads into commercial movie theaters (this time after it's already been in home theaters via Blu-ray), you'd think there would be a lot more requests for this kind of advanced audio post production.

You have to think BIGGER!

This 2010 AES paper suggests that Samsung is already at work trying to determine the appropriate complexity for HTIB speaker systems capable of 'good' reproduction of downmixed audio from [discrete] 16 channel to 22.2 channel source material--probably for sometime around 2020. (The abstract suggests that 'here' Samsung are perhaps evaluating the addition of just one more Tallboy "combination-middle-and-height-layer" speaker tower to 'something like' their existing DPLIIz capable HTIB systems...?) But whatever the state of the art for HTIB vendors|consumers, shouldn't serious audiophiles be looking just as hard to find satisfactory "quality" speaker configurations for the same time frame?!

Quote:

New 10.2-Channel Vertical Surround System (10.2-VSS); Comparison Study of Perceived Audio Quality in Various Multichannel Sound Systems with Height Loudspeakers

This paper presents the listening test results of perceived audio quality with several loudspeaker arrangements in order to find the optimal configuration of loudspeakers for a next-generation multichannel sound system. We compare new reproduction formats with NHK 22.2-channel and 7.1-channel setup of Recommendation ITU-R BS.775-2. The subjective evaluations focused on the loudspeaker configurations at the top layer were carried out with test materials generated with different methods, by mixing, and by reproducing B-format recordings. The results show that the perceptual difference in the overall quality achieved with the new 10.2-channel vertical surround system with 3 top loudspeakers and the NHK 22.2-channel system was imperceptible in a grading scale used in the experiment.

Authors: Kim, Sunmin; Lee, Young Woo; Pulkki, Ville
Affiliations: Aalto University School of Science and Technology, Aalto, Finland; Samsung Electronics, Co. Ltd., Suwon, Korea(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention:129 (November 2010) Paper Number:8296
Subject:Perception and Subjective Evaluation of Audio

[Of course, I have no idea how well this paper was received when it was presented! ]

Don't add them then. Just enable the preouts!

That's what Denon and even Pioneer have done.

Exactly. We are talking about flagship AVRs. Give them all the flagship features, 11.2 DSX and Neo:X being two of them.

OK guys - please don't flame me on this rather basic question! I have not been following this kind of discussion for sometime and I genuinely do not know what the answer is. For the height channel, why put in on the front/rear/side wall and not in the ceiling directly overhead? Afterall, fron speakers go in the front, rear speakers go behind, so why not put height speakers over your head!?! Thanks.

Because they are "FRONT height" channels

amen to that!

it's sad there are so few top drawer 7.1 titles. I have several that are technically 7.1 but have so little info in the rears, it's barely perceptable.

ironic that I can hear more back & surround channel info from adding PLIIx to some 2 ch tracks compared to the same disc's 5.1 surround track!

That's a sad commentary on the state of how some engineers seem to use surround. And I'm not just interested in wrapped music while 95% of the rest of the track is still up front coming from the center channel & all I may get to hear from the surrounds is a few russling leaves It depends on the genre, but I've heard action & SF films with disappointing surround use when it would have really added to the viewer involvement.

missed opportunities

For example, Master & Commander was a spectacular EX/6.1 track on DVD. Stunningly realistic and what did we get in Blu-ray? only 5.1 what a cheat! The studio really blew that one.

why worry about faux height when if the studios would just give us more true discrete 7.1, it could be a huge improvement in the experience without all the bull-pucky with adding 2-4 more speakers and buying new receivers & extra amps. Good marketing, I admit that - Bose would be proud

The good news is that 'correctly' miked recordings of live events will 'automatically' contain the correct balance of content between fronts, surrounds, and heights, and let us see (hear?) just how good the effects can be from genuine surround sound.

Some events shouldn't be missed: Japan's NHK TV filmed the last space shuttle launch at Kennedy in UHDTV (7680x4320 pixels) . . . and the 22.2 channel sound system had to cope with pressure levels exceeding 120dB! Supposedly, the video will be shown at IBC in September, 2011.

That would be awesome!
If it's part of a larger documentary on the shuttle, that would be a must have on blu

M&C was 5.1 EX on DVD and 5.1 EX on BD. Same number of channels.

Why would there be "a lot more requests" for something that doesn't make much difference, if any, to theatrical ticket sales or home video sales? It's the same reason they're not migrating to 96kHz sampling rate, even after more than a decade of digital audio (commercial cinema and home theatre).

Exactly so! If there comes a time when theater chains, internet streamers, TV broadcast|cable networks, or [next generation] video disk providers believe that increased corporate net income can be created by moving beyond 5.1|6.1|7.1, only then will content providers [be asked|paid to] make the shift to a higher channel count. Until at time, they have limited incentive to do so . . . and it's hard to see that (sea) change happening for at least another five or so years. [Ok, so let's all 'demand' that new source material have higher channel counts again sometime after 2016! ]

Podcast released on Home Theater Geeks with Fred Maher of DTS discussing their newest formats. Neo X on new Denon products 4th quarter. http://twit.tv/show/home-theater-geeks/78

Would that be the upgraded A1HDC that goes for 7.5 grand??

Fred did discuss 'superficially' the 'encoding mechanism' he is currently using at DTS to convert an 11.1 source mix to 7.1 (for BD authoring using existing technology). If I understood correctly, he alluded to creation of three matrixed elements: one 'in the L and LS channels' for LW content, a second for RW content, and a third for LH|RH content using (I think?) only the C|LR|RR channels.