5.1 Surround Sound Music Cd

About five years ago, I interviewed a husband-and-wife duo called Dubtribe Sound System, which composed and spun an ethereal sort of house music that was popular in the 1990s. During this interview, Sunshine (the husband) was musing about creating an album in surround sound. I hadn't really heard of surround-sound music albums, so I dismissed what he said as too-forward thinking. And so it went for a long time. However, I recently received a surround-sound music album called DE9: Transitions, released by another forward-thinking artist,.

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Also known as Plastikman, Hawtin is the DJ that other DJs revere. I put the DVD in the DVD player, sat in the middle of our household's home-theater setup, and listened. It sounded great-subdued beats and rhythms swirling around me expertly. Despite that DVD, I still haven't heard too much about surround-sound audio albums. There is no lack of places to play them: luxury cars, satellite-radio players, home theaters. The same people snapping up Lord of the Rings DVD box sets and home-theater equipment are still happily buying standard music CDs.

The reason, I think, is a chicken-and-egg argument surrounding the way technology and people's buying preferences affect each other. The majority of surround-sound albums come in one of two formats: SACD or DualDisc. (There is another format called DVDA, or DVD Audio, but it's hard to find.) SACD, or, was created by Sony and Philips Electronics and launched in 1999.

SACD is a type of CD that contains very-high-quality audio that sounds great. It can contain true 5.1-channel audio, but isn't required to. According to Sony BMG, SACD is most popular for jazz and classical-music fans. 'The classical consumer and jazz consumers are a slightly older demographic,' says Leslie C. Cohen, senior vice president of new formats and business development at Sony BMG Music Entertainment. 'They have higher demands in terms of quality.' They also have more money, which you'll need to fully take advantage of SACD.

The SACDs themselves aren't expensive, costing only one or two dollars more than standard audio CDs. It's the player. To take advantage of the high-resolution audio, you have to listen to an SACD on an SACD-supported player. A quick scan of DVD players that support SACD audio ran from $300 to $600.

The newer format of SACD will also play in a standard CD player but only at CD quality. Many think SACD is on the way out, to be replaced by, which officially launched in February 2005. DualDiscs contain CD audio on one side and DVD audio content-which can be created in 5.1 surround sound-on the other side, so both standard CD and DVD players support them. Sony BMG says that for the titles it releases on both CD and DualDisc, 30 percent to 50 percent of sales are on DualDisc.

Artists include more-mainstream picks such as Jennifer Lopez and Dave Matthews. It's Not About the Music John Trickett is CEO of 5.1 Entertainment Group, which is a production and publishing company that produces albums exclusively on DualDisc. According to him, the reason people are buying DualDisc isn't the great audio quality. 'Most consumers don't care about having higher-resolution audio,' says Trickett, which is an odd comment from a man who produces only that. 'What we learned from DualDisc and SACD-both are great-sounding formats-is that a very small segment really cares about better sound. People are quite happy with CD sound. It's all about the content.'

That content is the extras such as videos, interviews, and outtakes-the special features that you'd find on a movie DVD. In fact, when 5.1 Entertainment Group records new artists for its Immergent and Silverline record labels, it takes high-definition video of recording and song-writing sessions right from the get-go. 'You can get the surround sound and an array of bonus features that really do add the value to the consumer,' says Trickett. Immergent Records' series of Warped Tour performance albums is released on DualDisc, a format that accommodates surround-sound audio and extra video footage.

Immergent Records' series of Warped Tour performance albums is released on DualDisc, a format that accommodates surround-sound audio and extra video footage.One telling sign of market demand is Immergent Records' Beyond Warped Live Performance series. This series of DualDiscs contains high-definition audio and video of primarily pop and punk bands that played in the.

Garage-band punk isn't naturally conducive to super-high-quality audio the way classical or jazz would be; however, the listeners of garage-band punk-teens and people in their 20s-have come to expect extras packed onto their movies, and now their music. So, it would appear that marketing bonuses are carrying the high-quality audio and not the other way around.

The reason is another audio technology: MP3. Its popularity has trained most to listen to lower-than-CD-quality audio and like it. 'Now that super-high-quality audio is readily available-and, thanks to desktop audio software like and, is getting cheaper to make-most people don't even really want it.

I hope that we, as a group, can learn to crave surround-sound music albums the way we crave HD movies and TV shows. The technology is there, but unless the public asks for it, there's no impetus for the record labels to consider it anything more than value-added content. Got an opinion on surround-sound audio albums?.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, surround-sound music looked like the next big thing, but in the intervening decade and a half, precious little rock, jazz, or world music has been recorded in surround. True, in the early days of SACD and DVD-Audio formats there were hundreds of remixes of older stereo recordings, and some were recycled on Blu-ray, but the number of newly recorded 5.1 titles remains paltry. Looking back, the early 2000s should have been an ideal time to launch surround music; multichannel home theater was peaking, so there was a large number of households with surround systems, but surround sound without an accompanying image was a non-starter. Steve Guttenberg/CNET Now, in 2014, multichannel home theater sound is on the wane; today's buyers are opting for single-speaker sound bars in ever increasing numbers. Multichannel sound at home is fading fast, and multichannel over headphones never took hold. The future of home surround for music and movies looks bleak.

Part of the problem for multichannel music is that no one ever really figured out what to do with the extra channels. Four-channel Quadraphonic surround recordings first appeared in the early 1970s, but 40 years on the engineers still haven't figured out what to do with all of those channels for music. I know of only one man, who has consistently produced excellent work, but I can't name any other major artists who have embraced 5.1 channel, music-only (no video) formats. Even if artists and consumers suddenly fell head over heels in love with surround music, I'm far from convinced the engineers could make recordings that would sound better than stereo. I've noted from time to time that when I attend acoustic concerts without PA speakers, almost all of the sound comes from the musicians on stage. I hear the instruments' sound filling the concert hall; the music is in front of me.

When I sit close up, say around 20 feet from the players, I hear a 'stereo' image. With my eyes closed I could point to each instrument; I hear that the drums are further back, behind the guitars and singers. I hear depth, but almost nothing from the rear or sides of the hall. Stereo recordings may be imperfect, but adding a center and/or rear-channel speakers doesn't make music sound any more realistic. Surround music has always flopped -, DTS 5.1 surround CDs, SACD, DVD-A - every one fizzled.

The proof of that is easy to see; if people loved 5.1 music, we'd see a lot more surround releases. If you can cite any noteworthy new, not remixed 5.1-channel rock, jazz, or world music titles, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Surround has been around for ages, and there's not much of note to show for it. Add to the fact that fewer and fewer music listeners have surround systems and there's even less of a market for surround music than before.