The Audiophiliac

This is the ideal 7.1 setup, but very few home theaters really look like this.

(Credit: Dolby)

An industry insider recently admitted to me that only 30 percent of AV receiver buyers ever bother to hook up all seven channels to their receivers. That guesstimate seems a little high to me; the standard 5.1 channel setup: Left, center, right speakers upfront, and a pair of surround speakers to the sides of the main listening position can supply a truly immersive sound experience.

Seven-channel home theater adds two more speakers, placed behind the main listening position. That's tough to accomplish in rooms where the couch or chairs are up against the rear wall. There's no "rear" there, so some folks mount the rear speakers up high, or bounce the sound off the ceiling.

Still, the rear surrounds typically contribute little, so it's pretty hard to justify the added expense and hassle of running the extra wires for a marginal sonic improvement. The one exception might apply to very large rooms where the side and rear surround speakers are further apart from each other. The extra coverage may produce a more complete sense of surround envelopment.

This may the ideal setup, but very few home theater really look like this.

(Credit: Dolby)

In the beginning of recorded sound, there was mono. One speaker, period.

Mono speakers were plopped wherever it was convenient, and that was that. Consumer audio remained strictly mono until the late 1950s with the introduction of stereo tape and LPs. Now you needed two speakers.

Home theater upped the ante to 5.1 channel surround sound--five speakers, plus a subwoofer--and setup hassles were getting tricky. Dolby's Web site offers very specific requirements for the placement of the front left, center, right speakers, and the side surround speakers. 6.1 and 7.1 systems add rear surround speakers.

It's one thing to look at a diagram, but your room probably doesn't look like the diagram. Reality sets in, so very few 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 system buyers get remotely close to the recommended speaker placements.

I've seen countless 5.1 home theater in a box systems in real people's homes with all five satellite speakers clumped in a row under or over the TV. Some buyers spread the speakers out across their entertainment furniture, still with all the speakers in front, near the TV. Obviously, those people don't want to string wires across the room. I don't blame them.

On one hand it'll sound "fine," but the envelopment the film sound mixers worked so hard to achieve will be lost. Don't worry, the Dolby Police won't arrest you for improper placement and the certain destruction of the filmmaker's intent.

If you have all of your speakers sitting in a pile, but I've made you a little curious, temporarily move the surround speakers out into the room. Put 'em on something to get them off the floor: A chair, bookcase, furniture, and so on. Play a few big action flicks and see what's up with surround. It might surprise you and just maybe you'll be inspired enough to make the effort to find permanent, around the room locations for the surround speakers. Hey, in 5.1 it's only two skinny wires.

It doesn't look much different from your average sound bar, but it sounds way better.

(Credit: Canton)

Truth be told, sound bar speakers don't sound very good.

That hasn't stopped them from selling like gangbusters. People happily buy the fantasy of single-speaker surround sound, mostly because they don't want to deal with all the wires and hassles of a bona fide 5.1-channel home theater.

I don't blame them. Even stereo, HT 2.0 systems are too intrusive for some buyers. Enter Canton's nifty CD 90 SB sound bar, it looks and sounds terrific.

I have to admit sound bars can look pretty slick mounted under a flat screen display, but there is the tricky matter of mounting the thing and running wires through walls. I suppose that's why most sound bars wind up sitting on a shelf under the display.

My real beef with sound bars is they don't sound all that good. The worst offenders are the ones that try to do some sort of fake surround sound. True, the better ones spread the sound well out to the sides of the room. Some project sound forward, towards the listener. But it's never as good as real 5.1.

Most sound bars' "surround" is only heard when you're sitting directly centered relative to the display and speaker; once you're over to the left or right the surround effect fades away. Worse yet, the sound quality of these things is iffy: it's either harsh or dull (most sound bars don't have tweeters). Mind you, sound bars aren't cheap: the better ones sell for between $1,000 and $1,800. For that much dough you could buy a really decent 5.1 speaker/subwoofer package with way better sound.

Granted, sound bar sound is passable when you're watching a movie, but try listening to music, and you'll realize just how lame the sound is.

The first time I met Tomlinson Holman was in the late 1970s, when he was in the high-end audio business. He designed electronics but went on to bigger and better things when he developed THX Sound for Lucasfilm. Later, I heard his experimental 10.2 channel sound system, and I came away with a whole new appreciation of his genius. Tom Holman is Mr. Surround Sound.

His newly revised book, Surround Sound, Up and Running provides an extensive overview on the subject. It was written for recording engineers and producers, but technically inclined home theater enthusiasts will gain new insight into how surround sound came to be.

Surround sound has been around in one form or another since 1940, the year Disney released the movie Fantasia. After that multichannel's history has been a series of false starts and doomed formats, and Holman covers them all. Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind initiated the modern surround era.

The chapter on Saving Private Ryan cites specific examples of how a sound mix is designed and conceived. Director Steven Spielberg wanted to keep the battle shots close-up and claustrophobic--the sound was used to put us in the midst of the battles.

The sound crew at the Skywalker Ranch recorded a full set of World War II-era weapons. On the Omaha Beach scenes the German defenses are mixed to the right and from the surround channels; the Americans from the front and left channels. Surround was used to track the sound of artillery shells whizzing by. The storytelling aspects of the film are heightened by the surround sound.

Holman covers multichannel microphone techniques, monitoring, speaker placement guidelines, audio coding, and psychoacoustics in depth. He has less to say about Blu-ray, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS Master Audio; I wish that he fleshed out these newest technologies a bit more.