Playing Around With Surround
Stereo sucks! That is the message on the front of my old DTS Entertainment t-shirt. I’m not sure I would be quite that harsh, but it is absolutely true that listening to a great recording in surround is much, much more involving than listening to traditional stereo. Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why audiophiles generally don’t embrace surround music. They include having limited space, limited funds to duplicate the great signal path and speakers that they have in their dedicated stereo system, the spouse acceptance factor and the lack of content in the genres they prefer. All valid issues…but it’s doesn’t mean that you can’t use you “home theater” for music enjoyment.
When I get the chance to chat with new customers at trade shows, I routinely ask anyone that approaches whether they have a Blu-ray player. I’m interested because those that answer that they do; get the pitch to try my 2013 HD-Audio Sampler (which has 41 tracks, multiple mixes including two 5.1 surround mixes and HD-Video of the productions). I know that all they have to do is spend about 30 minutes with that disc and they’ll be hooked.
Many times the response to the question is, “I have a Blu-ray player…but it’s not in my audio room. It’s used in the home theater for watching movies.” Audiophiles segregate their “real” music listening between their man caves where expensive turntables, phono preamplifier, stereo tube amplifiers, and speakers dwell and the home theater where everyone is welcome and the equipment more pedestrian.
My pitch then continues by urging the visitor to “just try the sampler”. By sitting in their home theater and skipping through the tracks, they will learn three things. First, they will finally have a chance to hear real HD-Audio tracks (those made from the start at better than CD resolution and unfettered by all of the usual processing), get familiar with the artists and repertoire that AIX Records has recorded, and stretch beyond the world of stereo music by switching to one of the alternate mixes. I’m especially interested in getting them to experience the aggressive 5.1 “stage” surround mixes, which are my favorite.
Most of the time it works. If the attendee has a reasonable 5.1 surround home theater, they will purchase the sampler and give it a shot…AND they will understand why I prefer sitting in the middle of the music. But there’s a problem. We’re living in an age of downloadable or streaming content. There are very few music productions and download sites that make surround music available.
I know Channel Classics and 2L sell surround versions of their productions but they are exceptions not the norm. All 85 of my productions have multiple surround mixes AND they are all available on the iTrax.com website. But what do you do with the surround files after you’ve downloaded them? How do you play them? What sort of hardware do you need? You’re going to find that your Mac Mini with Amarra or Audirvana or your PCM music server running JRiver can’t handle multichannel music.
Discs are easy. Your multichannel SACDs, DVD-Audio discs, DTS CDs, Blu-ray Pure Audio discs and even DVD-Video titles deliver surround music easily. Simply slide the disc in the player and presto…out comes decoded 5.1 music. But when you have a downloaded surround music file, you have to be a little clever to get your 5.1 surround music fix.
Tomorrow, I’ll share some of the easiest ways to play surround downloads.
Hi Mark. I’ve seen at you a few of the Salon de Image shows in Montreal and the new Toronto show. I have quite the Home Theatre setup (http://www.edoucet.com/hometheatre.htm) and read your post every day. Today though, I feel I have to comment.
While I listen to multi-channel a lot, I still prefer to listen to good quality 2-channel music. The sound stage on good recordings is incredible as you know. The other problem is that myself and most people can only afford 2 really good amps (as you will see on my link I have Peter McAllister’s OTLs – the best sounding tube amps I’ve ever heard!) I could never afford to buy another 3 which I would need to balance out the sound in 5.1.
The other issue is that I have converted all my good music to .FLAC format to play through my custom-built computer using JRiver. This sounds way better than playing any CD through the OPPO or many, many other CD players (even ones costing upwards of $3K, of which I have auditioned.) Your music comes on a disc. I have several of them, but I would want them in high-res digital form so I can use my computer system to play them and not my OPPO. Why not include the digital format of all the tracks I purchase? 2-ch and multi-ch? Then I can utilize JRiver and not have to keep switching over to my OPPO.
Thanks for your time…..
Eldon, thanks for the comments. I understand and appreciate your affection and preference for 2-channel stereo. It’s for reasons that I explained in the piece. I also appreciate the need for file deliver…and that why I make the files available on iTrax. You can download AIX Records music in stereo 96 kHz/24-bit from there.
I know it’s available there, but why do I have to pay for it when I’ve already purchased the disc? I’m saying the disc should include the hi-rez files as well.
The problem is the tremendous additional cost of publisher’s royalty. Every version of every track costs a little more than a dime…if the tracks on on the disc 5-7 times the costs go up dramatically. The major labels spend about $1.00 on a CD for publishing…I pay $3-4 and with additional versions it could be as much as $7-9 each title. I’m looking into options.
You can rip the Blu-rays or DVD-A, just as you would a CD, and convert to FLAC; there are lots of programms available to do this on the internet, some free, some not.
And of course you can rip any disc with the right tools.
The easiest way to play hi-def downloads is with a player that can play them off a USB drive or – even better – over a home network using DLNA or UPnP (of which DLNA is a subset).
I use a freeware UPnP/DLNA server for Windows called oShare that I got from SourceForge.net – it’s as simple (and tiny) as they come because it does no conversion between formats – it just lets you browse the folders on the server’s hard drive that you’ve told it to share, and lets your player stream the original files over your network.
It works fine for 96/24 5.1 music as well as for stereo music (and even video). To save space on my server, and speed the network traffic, I buy the FLAC versions of high-def music, including iTrack’s stage mixes.
To reduce frustration from scrolling through long lists, I’ve set up a heirarchy of folders: four top-level folders (“A-G” “H-M” “N-S” and “T-Z”) with individual letter folders inside each of them, musician’s name folders under those, and album folders within those. If I have several versions of an album, they’re in parallel folders inside the album folder, for stereo and 5.1 hi-def mixes, and a redbook version as well.
My Oppo BDP-93 can browse those folders and display a track’s album cover thumbnail while playing it.
To enable access to a selection under multiple musicians’ names, I use “junction folders” that are essentially aliases that all look at the same copy of the music files. This does, however, rule out using tag-based library organization, as that sees the aliased copies as additional copies and plays each track from an album multiple times before advancing to the next!
I access the 44.1/16 folders in my library remotely over the internet using BubbleUPnP, a Windows and Android based client-server system that works with a Foobar2000 plug-in called fooUPnP. All of these are free except the Android module, which costs the princely sum of five dollars. (fooUPnP can act as a remote player as well as a server, and adds a nice library search function.) I skip over the tag-based folders in the Android’s interface, and go straight to the “Folder” choice at the bottom to get into my folder heirarchy.
To save cellular bandwidth, I’ve instructed BubbleUPnP that when the Android client is on WiFi to send the Redbook CD WAV file, but when the client is using cellular data to transcode it to mp3.
Like the Oppo, the Android BubbleUPnP also shows the embedded album cover, but unlike my Oppo it can play a concert gaplessly – for the Oppo I take the extra step of making a “single track” concatenated version of a concert.
Thanks for stealing my thunder for tomorrow.
Phil, I use minimserver (which is multiplatform: windows, mac, linux etc) as the media server. It is pretty efficient, at least on my mac, and it used tag for organization. I also have bubbleupnp to set up the access point. Bubbleupnp is also multiplatform. I use plugplayer app on my iphone mainly as a remote. In Bubbleupnp, I had my receiver as the media renderer as OpenHome, which allows for gapless playback, at least if I use the iphone app as a remote. See if bubbleupnp lets you create an OpenHome renderer of your Oppo so you can do gapless playback without having to create the single track version.
Mark, looking forward to tomorrow’s post about how to play surround from a PC downloaded file. I’ve struggled with this for some time as I have a Meridian system that only accepts a digital input and I do not seem to find a way to send the correct format from the PC. Please also tell us how to do this from a PC as well as Apple. Some of you earlier posts about software (Amarra) only applied to Apple. Thanks.
Will do.
Mark, Thanks for your reference to Multi-channel music and your efforts in its production.
In my opinion, it is “extremely” hard to go back to stereo after immersing yourself in surround music. Stereo is like a 2D wall hanging in comparison. So much so, that a friend of mine “synthesizes” his stereo recordings into 5.1. Of course, some stereo discs are friendlier to this treartment than others, but at the end of the day it is all about “entertainment”.
I’m with you Warren.
The problem I have with multi channel is the typical mixes I hear. They take something from the original mix and highlight it in the back channels or they spin it around the room. I am supposed to be entertained by these effects. Problem is, I don’t need them. I am entertained by the music. Mark; your recordings are the exceptions to this issue. They are done right, and I like them. But I am also not too enthused about having to become a computer geek just to play my music. The terms and formats you and others talk about don’t mean anything to me and I really don’t want to deal with the complication just to play music on my system which I use for relaxation, not frustration through trying to make something just work.
It’s true that there are lots of terrible surround mixes. However, you have to realize that there is no model established like there is for stereo. That’s part of the reason that I include multiple 5.1 surround mixes on my releases.
As I was reading your article, it coincided with my investigation into the use of quality headphones for surround sound music. You may have already dealt with this elsewhere, but is it possible that headphones would give you a surround sound experience to match a 5:1 surround system? The headphones I have been studying are Audeze LCD-3. A review in What Hi-Fi Magazine said of these phones “It is worth considering that it would take tens of thousands of pounds to buy a pair of speakers that can even approach the Audeze LCD-3s level of sound quality”. I would greatly value your opinion on the above statement. Unfortunately, I cannot travel to a store that stocks these headphones to listen for myself.
Regards
Ron Nash
I don’t agree with the statement that it would take tens of thousands of pounds to equal the fidelity of the LCD-3s. Headphones can do a really terrific job of reproducing music but it is a different experience than listening in a room with a pair (or even 5.1) of reasonably good speakers. A pair of the best speakers in the world (IMHO) are the M2 Reference monitors from JBL and they are only $20K for a pair including amplifiers! You could spend tens times that or one tenth of that amount for speakers and have great sound. You might want to check out the Smyth Realiser and the magic that it can perform…creating a virtual room of speakers in a set of headphones.
Mark, while we are on the subject of surround music, now that ATMOS is available at the consumer level, what are the chances for ATMOS music mixes as downloads or physical media? While I appreciate 5.1 and 7.1 surround and even 2.0 stereo, they all produce sound in a single flat plane. Any sound outside of that plane is a result of reflections, etc. caused by the room. ATMOS changes that, it adds the third dimension.
I’m not sure music mixers and labels will be interested in Atmos or Auro 3D. Heck, I’ve been trying to get music fans interested in more than 2-channels over the past 14 years.
I would like to point out that my MacMini/JRiver setup does indeed handle multichannel via the HDMI output of the Mac. That was something that I was very pleased to discover.
You’re right JRiver does do multichannel…my mistake.