Surround Sound: Making movies sound like real life
Surround sound makes the movie theater experience worth the price of admission.
Last year, I convinced my wife we should have a theater in our house. I had spent the preceding year learning as much as I could about theaters. I had a small budget to work with considering I needed everything.
So I hopped on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace looking for a deal like I always do.
In my research I figured out the most important thing is the speakers.
So I started looking into the different surround sound layouts. I was familiar with 5.1 since it had been around since I was a kid. The others were completely foreign to me. There’s formats including 13.2, 9.1, 7.1.2, 9.1.4, Dolby Atmos, and many more.
Today I’m going to share my learnings.
Now let’s dig deeper into surround sound.
A quick surround sound history lesson
Surround sound started in 1941 with Fantasia.
Yes the Disney movie. The sound engineer created 4 separate tracks of an orchestra. Using these tracks he assigned specific instruments to certain speakers. The sound needs to be turned up or down depending on how the sound was used.
