The View From 2009: I keep meaning to convert to this wild and crazy setup, but I’ve been doing enough mastering work that I haven’t been willing to install it permanently. Maybe this year, as I’m getting back to composing, and no longer taking on mastering efforts.

A Happy Accident: A Better Way to Play Back Stereo?

Our Story To Date

Alert readers will recall that I recently attended a Multichannel Audio Conference in Banff, Canada, and was suitably inspired by various goings-on there to try a “new” surround sound layout – five channels in a pure pentagon, with a speaker in the center and left and right speakers at 72° and 144° off center on both left and right. Take a look at the graphic (from Total Recording.)

	Figure 1. A template showing the angles for a pure pentagonal array

Trust me on this. When you first set up left and right this wide, it actually looks more than a little improbable. I don’t think I would have dared to do it without my wide-dispersion Acoustic Lens Technology (ALT) prototype loudspeakers. 72° off-center really wraps around you a long way! Take a look at the graphics. Figure 2 is a photo of the front of my studio with a standard 30° 3-channel setup, and Figures 3 and 4 are the same view with a 72° setup. Note that I couldn’t even take a picture of the 72° setup from the median plane with a stock camera!

	Figure 2: My wide-dispersion prototypes at 30° off center. Angles not quite to true perspective.

	Figure 3 (see Figure 4)

	Figures 3 and 4. My pentagonal front 3-channel monitor array, with Left and Right 72° off center. Angles not to true perspective.. Sorry for the messiness. It was a busy week!

However, one of the features of Acoustic Lens Technology is that it yields exceptionally strong phantom images, images that generally appear to emanate from the surface of the wall behind the speaker pair. So, I had hopes this wouldn’t turn out too badly.

Well, the first thing I figured out was that most surround music recordings don’t have enough center channel to support a phantom image with the speakers this widely spread, and even our Acoustic Lens Technology couldn’t reliably support a strong phantom when Left and Right are 144° apart! What this meant was that I was going to have to establish a default “downmix” of Left/Right to feed to the Center mixed with the Center track itself. So, back to the console I went to set stuff up. And here is where I got distracted . . .

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