Upgrade to 7.1?

[ClaytonMG]

Originally Posted by Gremal

All you need to justify it is the existence of blu-ray discs with 7.1 tracks. I just popped in a great one the other night, Exiled.



It is to the sound engineer who developed the 7.1 track.



Be more specific. If a gunfight has erupted offscreen or a car is crashing offscreen, a good sound designer will make the effort to assign the noises of those effects to the appropriate area around the listener. Granted, you don't need 7 separate speakers to make this happen, but if a BD has a 7.1 track, why wouldn't you want to listen to it? It isn't a matter of distracting or enhancing, it's a matter of reproducing what's on the disc. If a 7.1 track exists on the BD and you've only got a 5.1 system, you're not going to be able to reproduce the track as it was engineered.



No, no, no! The goal for any speaker is to take the signal and produce the audio without coloring it or muddying it. The goal of a good RECORDING ENGINEER is to make the stereophonics such that sounds appear to not be "stuck to the speakers", which is what you're talking about in terms of filling the room. But we should be able to pinpoint where a specific noise is coming from in the soundstage. Surround speakers shouldn't make it hard to tell where a noise is.



Point taken, but some were remixed for Blu-ray in 7.1 and to hear the new mix, you really need a 7.1 system. I hasten to point out, the Godfather was never originally intended to be 5.1, but I bet you'll want to hear what Paramount does to the mix.

That is more my point. At no point should something behind the listener become distracting. And by fill the room with sound I mean more fill in the gaps. I am also not saying "don't use 7.1!!!" But I am saying that if you use 5.1 with Surround EX, PLIIx, or even the THX processing modes, you'll get the same effect as a 7.1 track. Unless the film was actually mixed for 7.1. Like right now, if you take a 7.1 Blu-Ray, those extra sounds that were originally in the side channels and then moved to the rears for 7.1, end up just getting stuck in the sides when playing the track. Where as if the film was in 5.1 and you enabled PLIIx or any of the other modes I was talking about, there's more of a chance of the sound coming from the right area of the room. Get what I am saying?