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Surround Sound Experiment
🕑 Added 2023-12-15 14:46:26 +0000 UTCTL;DR - I set up some extra speakers in a quad arrangement in the studio and mixed a test ambient-only track. If you have a surround setup like this in the place you game, please give this a test and let me know how it went!
Greeting Patrons,
I've been playing around with speaker configurations and I had this crazy idea. Last month, I purchased my first new studio monitors in 20 years and I've been loving them. But I found myself with an extra set of speakers. So, last weekend, I installed my old monitors in a surround configuration. Technically it's quadrophonic (4.0) and not the usual home theater 5.1 which includes a center channel and an LFE (sub) channel. (In 5.1 most movie ambiences are limited to 4 channels anyway as the Center is reserved for dialog and the LFE for the booms)
I know next to nothing about this format other than I enjoy the occasional helicopter whizz-by when I'm watching movies. I've done a lot of reading, video watching, and head-scratching at this point and I was going to start this whole thing by having a poll where you would let me know if you had a multi-channel setup at home, or in your gaming space or what-have-you.
My gut tells me that most of you probably don't, but the few of you who do are really into it.
I don't know if this will become a thing or if I can even figure out the workflow. There's so much I don't know. But I thought I'd give you all a peek at the first test run, which works great here but I honestly have no idea whether it will translate.
I've attached 2 files. The first is a short 5.0 (no LFE/sub-track) test file that will say the names of the speakers it's currently playing out of. If this works, the campsite track will work also.
The second file is a 5-minute ambience-only 5.0 track of a campsite I created with some lovely surround sound wind, some distant thunder, a horse that lazily circles you as it grazes, a campfire with a cookstove, and assorted wildlife. I did absolutely nothing in terms of eq and the levels are probably way off (I kept them purposely low) so treat this as a proof of concept.
The track order is based on what I believe is the most common convention/configuration for 5.0: Left, Right, Center, (Sub), Left Surround, Right Surround. It's rendered as 5.1 with the 4th channel empty. So a 5.1 file with empty channels 3 and 4.
All of this of course is provided you have a computer connected to a compatible audio system using a digital cable. I can't provide much (or anything really) in the way of tech support but I will say that Foobar 2000 (available for free on Mac/PC) plays this file perfectly. If you do get this working and wouldn't mind sharing your setup tips I'm sure people would appreciate it.
Best,
Tim
Comments
There are actually some other fun applications for this sort of thing that work with stereo headphone setups, using head-related transfer functions (HRTF) to record binaural audio. Some games have used it to great effect (Overwatch, CS:GO), but it can also work surprisingly well to downsample multichannel audio. HeSuVi is a fun free app to experiment with them, although I still prefer raw stereo for most use. https://sourceforge.net/projects/hesuvi/
Tabletop Audio
Interesting, thanks for testing. I believe only the Sonos home theater products support multi-channel audio, everything else is 2-channel only.
I run a mildly complicated setup and use 2 Sonos systems for the majority of my audio, 1 for music and 1 for environment noises (when I remember such things) but got an "Unsupported Filetype" error from the Sonos system when I tried the surround sound test. Other OGG files work fine like the ones from the Soundpad. I'm guessing the channel separation is the issue but I don't know much about that part. Love that you're looking into surround though.
