Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: June 20 2012, 10:21 |
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| Quote (Black Bunik @ June 20 2012, 07:27) | | 5.1 is definitely fun, but sitting among musicians, or instruments dancing around is kind of unnatural. |
Really? I do it all the time 
Having a piano that stretches right the way across your room (or, if you have headphones on, has a stereo image like you've got your head inside it) isn't really all that natural either, yet it gets done quite a lot in music mixing...
Actually, there are all sorts of little questions - like should a drum kit be panned from the player's perspective (hi hat towards the left), a 'listener's' perspective (hi hat towards the right...but then again, we have to ask, where is the listener and how much of his/her stereo field does the drum kit actually occupy? It's common to pan a drum kit right across a stereo image, but if the band were on stage, that's more the perspective you'd get by sitting on the stage in front of the drum kit, or on the drummer's stool with your back to it, than if you were listening from a few metres away)...or just have it all in the middle?
Actually, what I was intending to question here was the general idea of how many channels are actually necessary or desirable, more than questions of what the idea of 'reality' is in a music mix!
I remember reading how Brian Wilson was against using stereo for a long time - he asked how many people want to go to a party, be sat on one side of the room and only hear half the music. He's actually got a very good point there - if I don't want to sit down in an ideal position and listen intently to the music, but just have the music on while I'm doing something else, stereo already creates problems. It also makes it more difficult in placing speakers in environments where they're not the top priority (would you design your kitchen around getting a perfect stereo triangle from your cooking position, or would you just place the speakers where they're not in the way? If it's the former, would you then really not want to move from that position at all while the music is playing?).
There's this rather marketing-driven idea that stereo is always better than mono, which I find can sometimes be a very difficult thing to get people over when I'm training people in live vs studio engineering. Sure, we've got two (or four, or eight, or more...) speakers in a live environment, but it doesn't mean that running it in stereo is going to make the sound 'better' - it's probably going to make it worse. The main goal there is to have as even a coverage as possible - running a few stereo effects and even perhaps the odd crazy panning effect (if that's your kind of thing) is going to be fine, but panning one guitar hard left and the other hard right is going to create the exact same problem that Brian Wilson was talking about, that people on one side get a radically different mix from those on the other.
This isn't me having a "stereo is bad, mmmkay" rant, but just a suggestion that configurations like 5.1 can indeed be massively problematic. With stereo, people can put one speaker on the bookshelf and one behind the sofa in their living room, and they lose a maximum of half of what you've put there (plus, of course, there's often a left-right balance control, which you hope they might have left alone). 5.1 brings in not only more possible speaker placements, but also more possible adjustments - many of which, in the average home, will probably be set up to somehow give a good effect on films (like cranking up the sub for all the explosions, and the centre so the dialogue can still be heard over them).
That doesn't mean that I think 5.1 music's a bad idea, any more than I think that stereo's a bad idea - I actually think it's lovely, if you have the opportunity to sit down in the middle of a properly set up 5.1 system and just feel completely enveloped by the music. It does become much more problematic when the system's being used in situations where you don't want to sit there like that, though.
It does also bring in more questions of how the music should be portrayed. I don't really feel it's such a question of what's actually natural or unnatural - it becomes unnatural as soon as we place a microphone and make a recording, that very act is already creating something different to what's there - it's modifying rather than simply capturing. It's more about what sort of impression we want to give, what sort of picture we want to create.
I think, though, that the problematic nature of 5.1 systems in homes, that very fact that they can be expensive (for equivalent quality to a given stereo system) and sometimes difficult to find space for, and that they require even more time (and a degree of knowledge) to set up to get the best results from them, is always going to limit their appeal.
I do welcome more 5.1 material from Mike, it's always an interesting experience to hear. I'd personally be particularly interested in a full modern-format release (SACD would be nice, to go with the Tubular Bells that's was already made available, but I suppose I'll take whatever format they're prepared to invest their money in...) of the quad mixes from the 70s - particularly Ommadawn and Exposed. If they're willing to throw in Incantations while they're at it, I won't say no...
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But then, Mike often has highly self-contradictory opinions about his own work - maybe he does love Amarok.
You know what a really funny thing is? Tubular Bells II (the actual album) doesn't really sound like Amarok, which sounds a bit like an Ommadawn II, while TBII sounds like TB (but better 
). I wonder what would've happened if Amarok had really come out as TBII. Probably it wouldn't have been a fan favourite at all.