This meeting was co-hosted by the PNW Section of the AES and Shoreline Community College
The PNW Section and Shoreline Community College in Shoreline, WA hosted the well-known Surround Sound Seminar presented by Mike Sokol of Fits and Starts Productions. Aproximately 90 people attended the seminar, held at the college's Music Building.
PNW Vice-Chair Dave Tosti-Lane opened the meeting, which was a comprehensive introduction to recording for surround sound, complete with demonstrations. Mr. Sokol covered, among other things, speaker positioning and alignment, bass management, the standard levels for monitoring and various surround encoding and delivery systems and their peculiarities.
For example, because original track assignments to specific surround tracks differs among encoding systems, the importance of adding a vocal slate at the head of each original track in a surround recording was emphasized. Mr Sokol also discussed the use of a consumer level surround decoder as a studio tool for checking the "down-mix" of a surround recording. He pointed out that it was essential to perform this check since all consumer playback systems will automatically down-mix a surround encoded source.
Another tip discussed was the importance of putting some signal in the center channel, even if the intention is to use the left and right front speakers to derive a center image. This became obvious when several early surround releases used totally derived center images, and consumers began flooding manufacturers with complaints that their center speakers "weren't working." Additionally, Mr Sokol stressed that it was essential to put some low frequency energy in all channels of the mix, and to avoid total reliance on the subwoofer for the low end, since some consumers may choose to get by without a subwoofer.]
Some slightly off-beat topics included surround for CD-Rs, Powerpoint presentations, hard drives and live techniques for reinforcement and the theatre.
Mr. Sokol had a complete surround recording and playback system set up, culminating in a recording of a live SCC bluegrass band with a 5.0 version of a Decca tree mike rig. Our thanks to "The Blue Grass Recording Group" of Tiffany Harshman, fiddle; Evan Bra-Heisner, acoustic bass; Kent Nelson and Michael Le Roche, guitars; Ethan Lawton, mandolin; and Gerrit Schimke, banjo.
The PNW doorprize drawings resulted in Darrell Forsberg winning 4 hours of studio time at Opus 4 Studios in Bothell, WA, courtesy of owner Dr. Mike Matesky, and Gary Beebe winning a free one year AES membership, courtesy of the AES.
-Reported by Gary Louie, AES PNW Secretary