The potential of 5.1 home surround system to create a wide listening area for music production

This essay looks at the potential of a common home surround system to create a wide listening area, or “sweet spot” for multiple listeners to experience a music mix at the same time. For simplification research and conclusions was made with the usage of non live recorded material in mind where some elements would have seem all to obvious where for example they should be put in the surround panorama: the 360° circle around the listener. Also, as surround mixing for music applications is a rare practice today, a lot of recommendations and examples of good practice are given for someone dedicated to working with it. Exclusively for this paper two sound engineers experienced mixing in 5.1 where interviewed and their input was implemented in the final discussion. The paper comes to the conclusion in the end that the 5.1 format has good potential of creating a wide listening area, considerably larger than stereo, when the speakers at the end user are of fairly decent quality and placed fairly close to ITU standards.Validerat; 20101217 (root