At the 12th annual GRAMMY Producers SoundTable, which took place Jan. 22 at the NAMM Show, more than 375 attendees heard an all-star panel discuss the ongoing evolution of surround audio recording and mixing. Composer/producer BT, engineer/producer Bob Clearmountain, producer/studio owner Martin Walters, mastering legend Doug Sax, producer/engineer Elliot Scheiner, and producer/engineer Al Schmitt comprised a panel with dozens of GRAMMY wins and nominations between them. The panel was moderated by Ed Cherney, also a GRAMMY-winning producer and engineer.
Cherney set the tone at the outset, noting (somewhat hyperbolically) that surround music was the "greatest thing since electricity. We're here to spread the word about high-resolution music." But he quickly cautioned that much of the excitement that 5.1 music can create is being diminished by a combination of ongoing format wars that confuse consumers, and by less-than-stellar monitoring systems in households infatuated with the home theater phenomenon.
Walters echoed that assessment when he commented, "Many consumers don't have full-range speaker systems [at home]. They're using satellite speakers of the type that come with home theater systems. To get the best effect from surround music, all speakers [in a surround array] should be identical. Surround music doesn't translate well to satellite speakers."
These observations come in a context that has seen 16-bit-and-less music formats begin to change the music industry's distribution channels, starting a slow migration of sales from brick-and-mortar retailers to the Internet. Pro audio itself is undergoing a similar revolution; developers of the software-based music recording, editing and mixing systems that dominated the front of NAMM's pro audio hall - the largest pro audio presence yet at the annual shows - were discussing new retail distribution channels of their own, including using big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy as conduits for music systems whose costs diminish as their levels of power and accessibility increase.
Panelists identified several of the critical issues facing a pro audio industry that wants to avoid the ghettoization of high-resolution formats to niches. Sax summed up their frustration when he stated of high-resolution formats such as DVD-A, HD-DVD and SACD, "If the industry had planned to make it more difficult for the consumer, they could not have done a better job," a statement that drew a wave of applause from the audience. Sax further noted that compatibility disparities even within existing formats, such as the lack of compatibility between U.S. and European DVDs, and lack of widespread support for dedicated high-resolution formats such as SACD, continue to hamper the ability of high-resolution formats to gain traction among consumers. "It's confusing as hell for me," he said. "I can imagine what it's like for consumers."
The panel also underscored the fact that surround music itself is a still-evolving entity.
But everyone agreed that one of surround music's charms was its relative lack of conventions compared to stereo mixing. Walters played a snippet from the GRAMMY-nominated Raise Your Spirit Higher by acclaimed African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo in which he moved the voices throughout the sound field as it played. "It wasn't presented to the listener as a choir would be, out in front of you, but rather as a band of madrigal singers, always shifting positions," he explained.
Producer/songwriter BT pointed out the benefits of surround for composers. "You can surround yourself with the elements of the track," he says. Surround music encourages an "aggressive" style of mixing, which he asserted can help move the narrative of a film in the same way the score itself does. Playing a piece of the theme he composed for the film Monster, BT explained that the mix began confined to the center channel, underscoring the helplessness of the character, later expanding into a greater number of channels as the character's persona took on more depth.
BT noted that many directors, including Monster's Patty Jenkins, embrace surround as an artistic tool. Resistance, he found, comes more often from film sound mixers who, ironically, will accept sound effects done in multichannel more readily than they will multichannel music.
An active question-and-answer session indicated that audience members were eager to move forward with their own surround projects. In response to questions on technique, Schmitt noted that he often pans from front to rear as well as left and right during surround mixes. Clearmountain added that his LCR array was wider than in standard stereo.
The discussion also brought out the fact that, as more catalog recordings are remixed for surround, their original elements are often missing in part or in whole. Several panelists noted that a large part of the work in remixing catalog projects is due to the research needed to determine which elements from many multitrack tapes were the ones the artists and original producers intended to use. And such confusion isn't limited solely to older recordings. Ed Cherney recalls doing a remix of a popular new release: "It was two months old and we couldn't find the masters."
The P&E Wing of The Recording Academy has, among other recommendation papers, created the guide "Recommendations for Surround Sound Production." It is available for download here.
