Surround music R.I.P.

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Ed Hughes, Jul 9, 2018.

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  1. Plan9

    Plan9 Mastering Engineer

    Location:
    Toulouse, France
    @dprokopy Steven Wilson's last album, To The Bone, arguably Pop Rock or Prog Pop however you want ot call it, released 08/2017 and went to #1 in the UK and other countries.
     
  2. Retrovertigo

    Retrovertigo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vancouver CA
    "Paul McCartney is Dead" :unhunh:
     
  3. Vaughan

    Vaughan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Essex, UK
    I'm not one for tin foil hats, but.........

    What's more DRM friendly than Vinyl? You can't cut Vinyl at home for yourself. Honestly, Vinyl is the end game of DRM.

    Let's face it, record companies didn't suddenly get interested in good mastering, or audiophile releases. Instead, they woke up to three key ideas (IMO): 1) Vinyl keeps physical product alive; 2) By reissuing Vinyl they can resell back catalog - AGAIN; 3) To all intents and purposes, it's copy proof.

    I don't think that's tin foil hat time, it's simply an obvious conclusion. When they ought to be pushing out arm fulls of catalog in hi-res on Blu-Ray, they're selling what is largely bare bones releases in different colors, and making a lot of cash by doing it. What's not to like?

    God bless Vinyl lovers, I'm all for people having the choice. However, as someone who bought into digital many many years ago, it's a retrograde step I don't want. As a music lover I'd like things to move forward, but in the tradition of a music industry that is cynical and seems to dislike it's customers, it took a sideways step with streaming, and a backward step for physical. On top of that, they actively killed off CD sales by crushing everything, and then giving it away for pennies on streaming services.

    Idiots.
     
    PhantomStranger likes this.
  4. lennonfan1

    lennonfan1 Senior Member

    Location:
    baltimore maryland
    I agree on PS and Pepper in surround, but I would add the George song was done well as was the single.
    If you have the Anthology DVD set listen to some of those surround mixes, they're excellent. ..especially the Abbey Road stuff.
     
  5. Classicrock

    Classicrock Senior Member

    Location:
    South West, UK.
    Surround (audio only) sound is pretty niche but formats that survive a few years tend to remain around ad infinitem - DVDA, SACD and Vinyl. Notable the later which proves there could always be a major revival down the road. Appears to be plenty multi channel mixes being released whether many actually listen to them only in stereo or not.
     
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  6. wiseblood

    wiseblood Forum Resident

    Location:
    Boston, MA, USA
    It's been years since I watched that and didn't have a surround setup yet. I'll have to check that out. Who did those mixes?

    I also have to watch the 1999 Yellow Sub DVD.

    The ironic part to all of this Beatles discussion is that I absolutely loved LOVE and that was Giles. I wish he was more aggressive on these album releases.
     
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  7. scompton

    scompton Forum Resident

    Location:
    Arlington, VA
    Eclassical sells surround and the don’t charge a premium over high res.
     
  8. tootull

    tootull Looking through a glass onion

    Location:
    Canada
    Agree! Love surround, live for surround sound. :D Kick that chair away.
     
  9. punkmusick

    punkmusick Amateur drummer

    Location:
    Brazil
    I haven't even tried it and it's already dead.
     
  10. Ed Hughes

    Ed Hughes Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    phila.pa.
    It's not dead.....yet.
     
  11. Surround Sound was promoted by the hardware makers so they could make extra profits.
    For the record companies it is just an extra expense to put the quad mixes out. Hence there is little interest to support the format for music.
     
  12. [​IMG]
     
    Retrovertigo and Ed Hughes like this.
  13. walrus

    walrus Staring into nothing

    Location:
    Nashville
    I wish they sold other music. I enjoy classical music but stereo is fine for me for that...most classical mixes barely use the rear channels at all, so there isn't much point to me.
     
  14. lennonfan1

    lennonfan1 Senior Member

    Location:
    baltimore maryland
    I wouldn't assume the White Album will be the surround disaster that Pepper was. those first few tracks with all that echo in the rears...yeesh

    with Yellow Sub, Only A Northern Song is amazing even though incomplete.
     
    wiseblood likes this.
  15. Most music listeners don’t want to be stuck siting in one spot for the entire session. They wank to walk around dance, share with friends in the room and enjoy the music so surround isn’t working for most of them.

    Movies and TV is different since you sit and watch
     
    PooreBoy likes this.
  16. chaz

    chaz Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    As far as I'm concerned this argument applies to stereo as well. Gee wiz if you aren't in the sweet spot, it's not perfect, but the music can still be enjoyed anywhere in the room! In fact I would argue a little more so with surround :D
     
    JimW, Kristofa, formu_la and 2 others like this.
  17. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    Thank you for the reply to my inquiry. The Parasound is an interesting option, though I need to think about the impact of 2 theater bypasses in the same system (I already use the theater bypass in my two-channel preamp when watching movies in my media room, and I'm not giving up my two-channel preamp for the Parasound unit). I don't think the spl unit allows volume level adjustments for individual channels.
     
  18. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    "The Dead are Dead!"
     
    Shvartze Shabbos likes this.
  19. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    I had a Classe AVP that had similar flexibility to the McIntosh unit, and I occasionally played multichannel DVD-As and SACDs through it with excellent results. After the Classe died for the third time, I gave up on it. At that time I could have gone for the McIntosh unit, but I was blown away by the surround sound processing on the even pricier Datasat R20i (which does not accept multichannel analog inputs). We use the listening room as a home theater and watch a lot of movies, so I took the better movie surround sound instead of the flexibility to play DVD-A and SACD multichannel audio. Sometimes when I look at my multichannel discs -- now unplayable on my system in multichannel -- I think about adding something like the Parasound unit to play multichannel, but there are a lot of complications and trade-offs to get it into my already complicated system.
     
  20. zen

    zen Senior Member

    Not funny.
     
    Shvartze Shabbos likes this.
  21. cdash99

    cdash99 Senior Member

    Location:
    Mass
    Perhaps this is covered, since I haven't read through the next 3 pages, but many car audio settings have an option to optimize the sound for the driver's benefit, as opposed to spreading it equally throughout.
     
  22. Millington

    Millington Forum Resident

    should'nt that be "They want to walk around"?:tiphat:
     
    brianplowe likes this.
  23. vwestlife

    vwestlife Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey, USA
    The problem is that music is more portable than ever before, and it's hard to be portable when you have to drag around four or five speakers.

    There are various phasing techniques to produce "3D sound" from stereo speakers or headphones, but that fad came and went in the late '80s/early '90s with QSound, Bedini Audio Spacial Environment (BASE), Roland Sound Space, etc., and suffered from lack of mono compatibility, which is still a problem whenever someone plays music on their smartphone's built-in speaker.
     
  24. Digital-G

    Digital-G Senior Member

    Location:
    Dayton, OH
    Sure it is. Isn't it an extra expense to put out a deluxe box set of music? Isn't it an extra expense to release a vinyl version of something when they could only offer the download?

    But they aren't putting out surround mixes and not charging extra for them. It may have seemed that way with Audio Fidelity but none of us know what the actual licensing agreement was.

    The fact is that nearly all music media fits into a niche market now. Vinyl? Yep. CD's? Yep. Hi-rez? Yep. SACDs? Yep. Cassettes? Definitely. I don't see surround music as being all that different, especially if we're talking about old mixes that already exist and haven't seen life since the 1960s or 1970s.

    If you aren't into surround music, that's great, but it's not just about the hardware manufacturers making more money. That isn't why there's so much surround interest on these forums and it isn't the reason people like Steve Wilson offers so many surround releases. There's definitely interest in surround - look up nearly any of the out-of-print titles on ebay and see what kind of prices they demand (Rumours, Hotel California, Avalon, etc.).

    The article is crap.
     
    Last edited: Jul 10, 2018
    fredblue likes this.
  25. darkmass

    darkmass Forum Resident

    Mercedes supported DVD-A as well. Two years back I picked up a pre-owned 2013 E-Class that has an in-dash 6 disk changer that supports DVD-A, DVD-V, DTS, as well as CD and MP3 CD data discs. The DVD-A, DVD-V, and DTS trigger the 5.1 surround. All two channel (CD, MP3, Cd's ripped to the car's internal 10 gig hard drive, the aux, USB, iPod, bluetooth, and in-dash Micro SD card stereo files) can have the Harman Kardon Logic-7 switched on for simulated 5.1.

    The left/right balance control is kept centered, since the Mercedes and Harman Kardon engineers did a creditable job of working with speaker positioning and known/fixed in-car soundfields to ensure the driver and each passenger gets a proper left/right and front/back auditory experience.

    I rip SACD multi channel DSD (via OPPO 103) to DVD-A 5.1 PCM, for in-car playing. That works.
     
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