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Old 04-12-2021, 03:28 PM
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70sMac 70sMac is offline
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Location: The Berkshires
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Default A Subjective Subject

Needless to say, one's taste in a given recording format can be very subjective, so I'm not really polling for favorites here.

I've heard DTS 5.1 Surround Mixes of very old music, which I referred to in the original posts as "old favorites" that sound pretty good to these [admittedly] old ears. I've also heard DTS upmixes of old music that sounds pretty good, as well. I'm sure that these mixes aren't considered to be the "best" by many experts, but, once again, this is a very subjective subject.

In order to simplify things, I'd like to start at the novice level and learn the basics of surround recording formats and what each has to offer. We've enjoyed our stereo "rebook" CD collection for many years, but the slow addition of certain equipment, mainly audio/video in nature, has changed things for us.

When we finally lost our last tube TV (in 2016), we finally shopped for our first "flatscreen" television. After auditioning several brands, we noticed that they all had those funny looking rectangular "strips" running along the bottom, which introduced us to soundbars. Well, as it turned out, we purchased an OLED TV and a Samsung soundbar to go with it.

As we stay pretty busy making a living, the new OLED TV was initially mounted to a wall bracket as quickly as possible...but the soundbar system, on the other hand, stayed in its box, collecting dust, until early last year (2020). That's when "covid time" gave us the opportunity to pay more attention to our home entertainment devices. So we took the TV off of the wall and used the stand that it came with to place it onto the top of a cabinet, which gave us a nice flat surface to easily rest the soundbar on...but I digress. The point is that once we used the television to play some of our physical movie media -- with the soundbar employed -- we quickly discovered that all of the insane money being put into modern film productions also includes some pretty heavy duty sound engineering. In short, that soundbar, and the active subwoofer it came with, changed the way we listen to our own physical media...and once I heard something like "You're Gonna Miss Me" by The 13th Floor Elevators [read: a song recorded in early 1966] via a blu-ray disc, I started to wonder what else I've been missing for years.

We also experimented with our speaker placement and the settings on our Mac MX units and, eventually, ran into the surround phenomenon...so long story long, I've been very impressed with what's happened to music recording and engineering ever since we stumbled upon it in our own home. The fact that sound engineering can deliver a new take on those "old favorites" I mentioned is pretty exciting to me.

So, once again, if anyone knows of a good place to start learning about the development of surround recording, I'd really appreciate your advice.
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Last edited by 70sMac; 04-12-2021 at 03:35 PM.
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