Why is spatialization at Sound Travels not done with Dolby Surround, Ambisonic, Holophonics, and other surround sound techniques?
Dolby Surround is a multi-channel format, but is not, in fact, a localization technique. It is an encoding/decoding standard used to distribute multi-channel audio. Dolby Surround uses a combination of tricks to squeeze 5.1 channels, that is, five discrete channels (usually Left, Center, Right and SurroundLeft+Right) plus one bass channel into the space occupied by two. Channel content is entirely up to the audio engineer. Conventional movie post-production usually places dialogue in the Center, stereo processing on Left and Right, and ambient material on the band-limited (100 Hz to 7 kHz), compressed (Dolby-B) Surround channel(s). Surround sound is generally not as bleeding-edge as the marketing hype would lead one to believe. Simply wiring an extra few speakers out-of-phase with a slight delay, and perhaps adding a sub-woofer on a crossover circuit, duplicates a surround sound effect. Soundfield microphone approaches, like Ambisonics, are more interesting, because they use a special
