Owner`s manual

Understanding Surround Sound

Today’ssophisticatedsurroundsoundsystemshavespawnedabewilderingarray

oftechnologiesandacronyms.Inthissection,we’llgiveyouabasicoverviewof

whatallthatjargonmeans.Asaresult,you’llbebetterequippedtouseyourSSP

and associated source components to their best advantage.

how many channels? Although formats with even more channel options will become increasingly

available,today’shomeentertainmentsystemstypicallyreproducesoundtracks

that include anything from one to eight separate channels of information.

Examples include:

• Watchingmonomovies,suchasCasablanca or e Wizard of

Oz, having only a single channel of audio information in the

soundtrack.

• ListeningtoamusicCD,whichistypicallystereoor2-channel

sound.

• WatchingtheoriginalStar Wars in the original Dolby Surround

Pro Logic format, which is four channels of information derived

from two channels.

• WatchingarecentmovieorTVshowina5.1-channelor

7.1-channel surround format, which identies that the source

material has either ve or seven full-range signals for the front,

surround, and in a 7.1 recording, rear speakers, plus the .1

signal for the Low Frequency Eects, also referred to as the LFE

channel, for the subwoofer.

YourSSPhandlesallofthesetaskswithease,switchingtoanappropriate

processing mode automatically upon sensing the nature of the incoming signal.

However, you may still have to select from the available choices. For example,

disc-based media often contains multiple soundtracks with varying numbers of

channels and even dierent languages. Because you may have to choose the one

you want to hear using the menu of the media itself, you should know what

jargonyou’lllikelysee.

matrix or discrete? When movie-makers rst wanted to expand beyond simple stereo (left and right

audio channels), they had a problem - the entire infrastructure on which they

depended was stereo.

Dolby Laboratories solved that problem with a system called Dolby

Surround

that embedded two extra channels of audio sound into the existing stereo pair

so that specialized circuitry could retrieve the extra information with reasonable

accuracy. is technique, whereby channels are mixed together with the

intention of separating them later, is called matrix encoding and decoding.

e disadvantage, as you might expect, is that it is dicult to completely and

perfectly separate two channels that have been mixed together.