Reference Guide

698

Surround Mixing

Surround Metering

Meters in tracks routed to surround buses or the Surround Main, and meters in surround buses work

the same as stereo meters (see “Metering” on page 609), however, surround meters display more

channels. For example, a project in 5.1 would have a six-channel meter.

Figure 123. Multi-channel meter

A. Six-channel meter

Each pair of hardware outputs still uses a stereo meter, but you will see the meters on several pairs

of outputs displaying levels, depending on how many surround channels your project uses.

See:

Bass Management

A bass management system takes all the frequencies below a certain frequency (normally 80Hz)

from the main channels, and the signal from the LFE channel, and mixes them together into the

speaker that is best equipped to handle them. This is usually a subwoofer, but sometimes the left

and right front speakers are used if a subwoofer isn’t available. The reason why this is done is to

make use of the subwoofer for more than the occasional low frequency effect, since the subwoofer is

there anyway, and to lower the effective response of the system to about 25 Hz.

When you encode to Dolby Digital, the LFE channel gets a +10dB gain on playback from Dolby's

decoder. This gives you the option of delivering some really powerful deep bass during playback,

like in that earthquake sound effect in your recording. Consider also that this +10 dB of low bass can

be added to any low bass that came out of the other 5 channels from redirection, so you realistically

can deliver a sound from the subwoofer that is more than +20dB above the sound from any other

speaker.