Multiple speakers per channel

Why? It would only corrupt the frontal imaging.


The goal is to enlarge the "sweet spot" to include multiple rows by greater diffusion of the side signals. Not as good as a single speaker per channel but necessary for larger venues.

Okay so using surround arrays like a large commercial theater is only to get more even audience coverage which actually might/does degrade the sweet spot? Okay because I was just thinking about setting up a multiple surround speakers per channel thing with a 5.1 system. using four speakers per channel; with two of them being in the back facing forward.

Isn't that called 7.1?

I do not understand why you want to do this. There are 2 reasons to add more speakers, (1) get more/louder output or (2) get more spatial coverage. You should not need to do (1) unless your speakers are inadequate. Change them. You should not need to do (2) unless you have multiple seating rows. Do you?

Otherwise, all you are doing is screwing up the specific imaging and source placement intended for the recordings. There is a proper speaker arrangement and that presumes ONE SOURCE per channel.

Yes I do have two rows of seating. Two couches, there's also a chair that floats around the mix. And who said 7.1? I said a 5.1 system with surround arrays. Like a commercial theater, who ALL have surround arrays with 5.1 systems.

And omg at the quick reply; it gave me a warning not to add to this thread as it was 967 days old. Reply in less than 12 hours.

Back at ya. Professional installations usually add appropriate time delays between the additional ranks of speakers.

So how does it sound good anywhere in the theater, if the middle sounds good how does the corner not sound bad and how does the front sound good, too.

Theatrical mixes rarely carry discrete, localized audio designed to tightly synchronize with sound from the front. If there's forest ambience or water dripping or distant gunfire in the surrounds, it doesn't really matter if it reaches the front rows a tiny bit later than the back rows; it's not really synchronized with the front channels anyway.

Most of the time, surround mixes on home video function similarly. But sometimes surround systems are used for things like multichannel music, where timing and balance among the speakers is more critical, and so those settings in the setup menu become more critical.

In a home theater, using bipole/dipole speakers is a common method of compensating for how small the room usually is. You prevent the problem of having someone so close to a surround speaker that they can't hear the other ones by using speakers that "smear" the sound along the side or back walls. Using multiple direct radiators, or aiming direct radiators away from the listeners, can have a similar effect.

So can going with 7.1, which when using 5.1 source material and a processor with Dolby Pro Logic IIx will spread the surround information amongst the four surround and rear surround speakers.

This is usually satisfactory for movies with their ambient surround mixes, but of course the better it works for movies, the poorer the results with discrete multichannel music where often the five full-range channels are treated equally in the mix.

Who says it sounds good anywhere in the theater? Some seats are better than others and some theaters are better than others.

@rdclark so for most movie mixes; which are the same on home DVD as they are in the cinema, right? I thought they both used DTS/DD and the mix was the same, using multiple speakers should be fine, it's just for multichannel music which is more likely to occur at home than in a cinema that it becomes a problem.

When you say "surround mixes on home video function similarly" it sounds like you're saying they are two often remarkably different mixes. Firstly, besides it being unnecessary, wouldn't it be impractical to mix a movie twice? once for cinema and once for home. If they do, why not just mix once in 10.2!!! lol

It's quite common for films to be remixed for home video, which offers a very different acoustic environment from a movie theater. It depends on myriad factors - the movie, the budget, the studio. Home theaters tend to be what's referred to as a "near field" environment, where a much higher percentage of the sound is radiated directly from the loudspeaker to the listeners' ears (particularly the front speakers). In theaters, much more of the sound you hear is reflected from room surfaces. These two situations can call for different emphases and processing during sound mixing.

Using multiple speakers for surrounds in a home presents potential problems, particularly if they're direct radiators. If you simply duplicate say, the right surround channel of a 5.1 mix on two separate speakers then for someone seated between those speakers they will simply hear a "phantom" surround channel appearing to emanate from directly behind them. But the same two speakers playing the same channel in a 7.1 system won't have that effect because the DPLIIx processing will change the phase relationship between the signals being fed to the two speakers (now designated surround and rear surround) to create a more spread-out, enveloping sound.

Before the advent of 7.1 and DPLIIx, there were other methods of wiring multiple surround speakers -- which are sometimes used in theaters as well -- to create a phase matrix that would prevent the phantom channel effect. But today, with 7.1 processors so common, it's a better way to go if you need a deeper surround field for larger HT roome.

The codec (DD or DTS) has nothing to do with any of this.

Rather than one single 'all purpose' mix of the soundtrack, what would better meet the OP's 'preferences' might be some form of "replay device independent" encoding (or perhaps more accurately "replay device and environment independent" encoding). However, while Digital Cinema and SMPTE 428M in the 1990s (vaguely!) seemed to have recognized the desirability of moving in that direction, I guess I don't see any real progress in this last decade or so!