|   Questions on 6.1 DVD's | Gary Jones
Jan 11, 2002 12:51 PM | | I've hooked my rear surrounds to my old Dolby amp to decode the rear speaker and I now get the full 6.1 sound from my 5.1 system and it works. I get all 6 suround speakers delivering seperate sound fields in the correct sequence. My question(s) are:
a) I am only using the Right dolby channel of my old amp to decode the rear surrounds.... what sound info is contained on the Dolby left?
b) When I switch to DSP Live and put a surround tape in the VCR, I get a full compliment of sound from the rear and back speakers. What information is being decoded from the rear surround channels? This only happens on Dolby Surround tapes.
c) If I was to hook up the front surrounds to a Dolby decoder while in 5.1, what sound information (if any) could I decode?
d) I only own three tapes .... Shrek, Jurassic Park III and The Cell .... all three have rear channel information encoded on them. It's not my imagination.... when I play The Cell, I can clearly hear traffic as it moves accross the three back speakers. Do all 5.1 DVD's contain an encoded rear channel? |
| re: Questions on 6.1 DVD's | Woochifer
Jan 11, 2002 4:48 PM | | a) In order to decode anything using a Dolby matrix type of encoding requires a left and right channel. The stereo separation will determine the surround channel that gets extracted. If you're referring to the amp output using a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, a matrixed surround channel is mono, no difference between right and left.
b) It sounds like that DSP program is simply steering the main output into the rear, similar to five-channel stereo.
c) I'm not sure what you're getting at here. If you're in 5.1 mode, that means that you're using Dolby Digital or DTS and extracting six discrete audio tracks. Ideally, you really should stay with that if the original soundtrack is a 5.1 source.
d) It is your imagination (a good surround system can supply this illusion), with a VCR you can only play back Dolby Surround, which by definition provides one mono surround track that gets output into both rear surround speakers. Using a receiver with a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder, the directional information from the mains gets mixed into the surrounds and it will give you a directional effect with the rear surrounds.
Not all 5.1 DVDs contain an ES/EX encoded rear center channel. In fact, only a very small percentage of DVDs contain any kind of ES/EX enhancement. |
| |
