Quadraphonic/Surround Sound

[JehuJava]

Not sure if this the right place, so mods feel free to move accordingly.

We're building a pseudo ship simulator at work and I took it upon myself to whip up some ship sounds to play during training. So I was planning on making a track in Ableton Live with engine, water, and equipment noises looped to a stereo track panned accordingly. Then I got to thinking, how do I put some noises LF and other noises RR,etc.

Can this be done? I can mix a good stereo track, but it'd be the cats butt to do something quadraphonic to play back on a CD-R or something. I can't seem to get a good answer off the net. Most articles just talk about how this was done in the 70's.

What do you think?

 

[seamonkey]

That sounds like a lot of fun!
Do you mean to encode surround sound like 5.1 onto a stereo track?
There is a quad panner in MaxforLive, it might be useful.
Then get a surround encoder for matrixing the 5 or so busses to surround.
I could see though keeping it in Live on separate busses, then using some midi to trigger sounds at different points on the different busses.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Not sure if this the right place, so mods feel free to move accordingly.

We're building a pseudo ship simulator at work and I took it upon myself to whip up some ship sounds to play during training. So I was planning on making a track in Ableton Live with engine, water, and equipment noises looped to a stereo track panned accordingly. Then I got to thinking, how do I put some noises LF and other noises RR,etc.

Can this be done? I can mix a good stereo track, but it'd be the cats butt to do something quadraphonic to play back on a CD-R or something. I can't seem to get a good answer off the net. Most articles just talk about how this was done in the 70's.

What do you think?

I'd think about what reproduction gear you are going to play it on. Home theatre 5.1 Dolby systems can be had relatively inexpensively, but you'd need to mix for that format and have something that can play it. But it does mean you could put the LF into the '.1' channel and if the system has a decent woofer that will mean you can place the '5.' channels physically into the simulator more discretely.

I'd love to play with a theatre audio system that could do surround for some stuff I've been doing which is quite atmospheric.

There's also the Ambisonics standard.

 

[JehuJava]

I'd think about what reproduction gear you are going to play it on. Home theatre 5.1 Dolby systems can be had relatively inexpensively, but you'd need to mix for that format and have something that can play it. But it does mean you could put the LF into the '.1' channel and if the system has a decent woofer that will mean you can place the '5.' channels physically into the simulator more discretely.

I'd love to play with a theatre audio system that could do surround for some stuff I've been doing which is quite atmospheric.

There's also the Ambisonics standard.

Yeah. We're gonna go with a home theater system. Looks like I'm going to have to use something like Sound Forge 9 or Adobe Audition to do the 5.1 or 7.1 mix as Live can't do it.

If you can picture a ships pilot house and aft deck in a room, I was thinking for audio as the rear of boat being the front of the audio. So:

LS: (Left front of pilot house) radio traffic, ventilation hum, little engine sound.

LF: (aft left deck) water sound, mechanical sounds, birds, some engine.

C: (Center aft deck) Maine engine sounds, birds, water

RF: (Right aft deck) same as LF just timed different.

RS: (Right front of pilot house) same as RF just timed different

LFE: I was think playing a super low Moog Minitaur note beating at the same frequency as the engine to give lots of oomph. Plus run engine sound here too.

We wanted to include one of those tactile bass shaker speakers to induce some vibration.

Do you think I need to make 6 sub mixes in Live for each channel then dump 6 tracks into a program that encodes Dolby AC3?

Do you think there is any special trick to the DVD burning?

 

[JehuJava]

That sounds like a lot of fun!
Do you mean to encode surround sound like 5.1 onto a stereo track?
There is a quad panner in MaxforLive, it might be useful.
Then get a surround encoder for matrixing the 5 or so busses to surround.
I could see though keeping it in Live on separate busses, then using some midi to trigger sounds at different points on the different busses.

I wish I could keep it in Live and run each channel in realtime, but I'm the only musician at work and I transfer in a few years. So, I gotta make this simple for all to use.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

Yeah. We're gonna go with a home theater system. Looks like I'm going to have to use something like Sound Forge 9 or Adobe Audition to do the 5.1 or 7.1 mix as Live can't do it.

If you can picture a ships pilot house and aft deck in a room, I was thinking for audio as the rear of boat being the front of the audio. So:

LS: (Left front of pilot house) radio traffic, ventilation hum, little engine sound.

LF: (aft left deck) water sound, mechanical sounds, birds, some engine.

C: (Center aft deck) Maine engine sounds, birds, water

RF: (Right aft deck) same as LF just timed different.

RS: (Right front of pilot house) same as RF just timed different

LFE: I was think playing a super low Moog Minitaur note beating at the same frequency as the engine to give lots of oomph. Plus run engine sound here too.

We wanted to include one of those tactile bass shaker speakers to induce some vibration.

Do you think I need to make 6 sub mixes in Live for each channel then dump 6 tracks into a program that encodes Dolby AC3?

Do you think there is any special trick to the DVD burning?

With the right tools you can create as many tracks as you like then place them in the 2D plane wherever you like with the 5. of the 5.1 and shove the bass end of things into the '.1' - i.e. the woofer which is omni directional. You can make water sounds be immersive that way, for example. You can't really get it convincing by putting individual sounds on discrete speakers, though. The tools for 5.1 will cost money, I would expect, but there's no way around it to make it convincing. There may be free Ambisonics tools out there, but I doubt you can drive a home theatre like an Ambisonics system.

You can probably find somewhere that has free-to-use samples of large engines which would be superior to synthesising it entirely. Even recording a car engine and dropping it an octave might be better.

 

[-Asdfgh-]

I count five categories: engine, radio, birds, water, mechanical sounds. But there's no reason, if it's going to be a canned (prerecorded) set up not to have multiple sources of mechanical sound, water lapping sounds, and birds. you can have birds pass by the 'boat' by moving the sound source gradual;y and have it ac3 encode it. If you try to do it with just 5.1 channels and timing it will sound more artificial, but it depends on budget and need for immersiveness.

http://www.ambisonic.net/gear.html if you go the ambisonics route, but you'll want (from memory) 6 speakers that you can power with individual channels (plus any LF rumble) and so a sound card that will do 7 channels. It likely need to be 6 identical speakers but not home theatre. But I think you might be able to get the plugins to do the placement of the sound for nothing, but the speakers will cost you more. It depends - you may find a 7.1 home theatre system that allows you to address each speaker individually in which case you might be able to do 6 channels of surround, one of LF, and send the last to something for vibration.

 

[JehuJava]

You're getting me pumped, man.

I grabbed a bunch free samples last night and made a generic stereo mix just to see how it would sound. It's ok. Nothing spectacular. Better than nothing. But moving to 5.1 or even better 7.1 would be so much more realistic. Ambisonics looks amazing, but seems way more complicated than I probably need. The panning with birds and water with multiple samples is crucial. Really the radio, mechanical sounds, and engine would be pretty static. Shifting the engine loop copy down an octave and mixing together is brilliant. Way better than synthesizing a rumble i think.

This what I tested last night.


The conversion from live to wav to soundclound sort of changed some of the levels and such...

I'll do some more research tonight.