Re: Immersive sound

[Mech <mech1@m3ch.net>]

Quoting andy butler <akbutler@tiscali.co.uk>:
> Travis Hartnett wrote:
> > Have you tried the three speaker setup described by Eno (I think it's
> > in the liner notes for "On Land")?
>
> Yep, it's on the back cover of Ambient 4 on land....
>
> One unsatisfactory thing about this setup is that it's assymetric, the
> 3rd speaker is in phase with one of the main speakers and not the other
> so there's always a hole in the surround.

Sorry to chime in a bit late here (sporadic net access while out on the 
road;
i'm about 600 messages behind right now), but I'm wondering if one of the
variations I've used for this might help with this problem.

A lot of the cheeseball "vocal zapper" effects (used for things like 
preparing
karaoke tracks) use pretty much the same principal to function.  Their
designers figure that the main vocal is going to be dead center 99% of the
time, so they use polarity differences and a bit of EQ to eliminate the
programming in the center of the channel.  When summed into mono, this can 
work
pretty well for generating the signal for a third back speaker.  I never 
really
noticed a hole in the surround using one of these, although I wasn't really
looking, so YMMV.

Relatedly, I've also had some luck with increasing the stereo spread using 
only
two speakers and one of the old Crate SRS mini-units.  They come up cheap 
on
Ebay occasionally, and while they don't really go so far as to create a 
real 3D
sound image, they do increase the apparent stereo separation.

       --m.


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