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Surround remixes


quintin3265
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Recently, I've been looking around to see if I can locate any surround remixes of game music. 5.1 music in other genres is becoming more common, and you can find DTS cds and even 7.1 TrueHD Blu-rays, but I have yet to find a single video game song that someone has remixed into 5.1 surround, even if the original was in surround.

Is anyone aware of any mixes like this?

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Wow, good point... Unfortunately, I don't have a sound system that supports that feature, but when I do I'll be sure to start making remixes of surround sound.

I think the problem is that if you don't have a system that supports surround you'll either lose some of the channels altogether, or the sound system will attempt to emulate the surround effect and muddy the music in the process. I'd guess that's why people don't remix in 5.1 surround.

I agree it should be done, though - it could potentially be pretty awesome.

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The reason is that the software, hardware and various other things are expensive, hard to come by or not supported. I would absolutely love to do an entire album in 5.1, but Ableton doesnt support 5.1, my audio interface doesnt support 5.1, and i dont have 3 other good monitors to mix it. Maybe in the future, but for me thats about a $2000 upgrade...

Not to mention most people dont have wonderful 5.1 surround systems, so spending all that time and having maybe 50 people be able to fully appreciate it is somewhat hard to try and swing the extra moolah on that stuff.

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The reason is that the software, hardware and various other things are expensive, hard to come by or not supported. I would absolutely love to do an entire album in 5.1, but Ableton doesnt support 5.1, my audio interface doesnt support 5.1, and i dont have 3 other good monitors to mix it. Maybe in the future, but for me thats about a $2000 upgrade...

Not to mention most people dont have wonderful 5.1 surround systems, so spending all that time and having maybe 50 people be able to fully appreciate it is somewhat hard to try and swing the extra moolah on that stuff.

While hardware can be expensive, listening equipment is not. You can buy extremely high-quality surround headphones for just $25. Look for a brand called "Listen to Believe." The headphones have a simple USB plug - you plug it in and then you can listen to 5.1 music. Because the speakers are closer to your ears, I've found that these headphones can actually sound better than a huge expensive speaker system.

And the headphones do actually improve the quality of stereo remixes. If you listen to "Rhymes with Elixir" by The Scuba Divers/Liontamer using these headphones, and set the bass redirection to 60Hz, Pro Logic II algorithms can easily separate the voice of the male and female rappers (the center channel) from the instruments (left, right, and surround left/right) and the booming drums (sub). The effect is awesome and that song isn't even written in 5.1.

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Recently, I've been looking around to see if I can locate any surround remixes of game music. 5.1 music in other genres is becoming more common, and you can find DTS cds and even 7.1 TrueHD Blu-rays, but I have yet to find a single video game song that someone has remixed into 5.1 surround, even if the original was in surround.

Is anyone aware of any mixes like this?

Hmmm... No, but surround sound would kick ass!

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While hardware can be expensive, listening equipment is not. You can buy extremely high-quality surround headphones for just $25. Look for a brand called "Listen to Believe." The headphones have a simple USB plug - you plug it in and then you can listen to 5.1 music. Because the speakers are closer to your ears, I've found that these headphones can actually sound better than a huge expensive speaker system.

And the headphones do actually improve the quality of stereo remixes. If you listen to "Rhymes with Elixir" by The Scuba Divers/Liontamer using these headphones, and set the bass redirection to 60Hz, Pro Logic II algorithms can easily separate the voice of the male and female rappers (the center channel) from the instruments (left, right, and surround left/right) and the booming drums (sub). The effect is awesome and that song isn't even written in 5.1.

While i appreciate the fact that cheap-ish headphones are good for listening to music, mixing in it is a completely different story. There is a completely different frequency response between "listening" audio equipment and "monitoring" equipment. The headphones you're talking about give a catered response to music, whereas monitoring speakers/headphones give a flat, accurate response. I'm not saying its impossible to have a good mix using $25 headphones, but it would be much more difficult, time consuming, and less-accurate overall, than actually buying professional equipment. Theres also a decent amount of psycho-acoustics going on with surround sound that is very difficult to emulate with headphones. That, and theres a huge difference (to me) between $25-50 headphones, and $400 headphones.

I really don't mean that to be as pompous as it sounds, but theres a huge difference between mixing with high-quality equipment and listening on budget equipment. Not impossible, but very difficult.

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Theres also a decent amount of psycho-acoustics going on with surround sound that is very difficult to emulate with headphones.

I've written papers on this shit. You can convincingly recreate 3D spatial audio on headphones for an individual, but it is a total bitch to generalise. Basically audio approaching from a certain direction will have different spectral qualities depending on the parts of your body in the way (the general term for these is head-related-transfer-functions) and the way it hits your ears that is not the same for everyone (plus a bunch of other factors like time-of-arrival differences between ears). If you know how they work for an individual, it can be incredibly convincing.

There are some pretty good general models but they don't work for everyone. To be honest its only really effective for short sound effects to help them sound as if they are moving around you. I've heard it and made one of my own at uni, but mixing a song using it would be pointless hard imo.

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