For Tech Support, call He's been an audiophile since high school, and a videophile since the introduction of HDTVS and high-def programming. Steve is a volunteer DJ at community radio station WTJU , where he's a regular host of the American folk show "Atlantic Weekly," as well as the world music program "Beyond Borders," where he gets to share his love of African music.
Steve is also a board member of the Prism Coffeehouse in Charlottesville. They produce a series of concerts featuring traditional and acoustic music, and he helps out with sales or anything else that needs doing in exchange for getting to hear live music almost every week. If '70s-era movie fans could have time-traveled to the present day, they'd have been astonished by the picture and sound quality available in today's movie theaters and home theaters.
It's been a long road, with home theater gear sometimes trailing and sometimes surpassing the movie theater experience. Until well into the s, movie theater sound was mono.
In the space allotted for the conventional mono track were two soundtracks that could carry not only left and right channel information, but also, by means of a matrix encoding process, a third, center-screen channel, plus a fourth surround channel for ambient sound and special effects. If you're old enough, you might remember big-budget films released throughout the '70s and '80s with the tag line "70mm and 6-track Dolby Stereo" splashed across posters and newspaper ads.
Those films represented the state-of-the-art movie theater experience of that period. When Bill Crutchfield started this company in , and for the first several years of our existence, Crutchfield was strictly a car stereo retailer. In fact, until the early '80s, our catalogs said "Car Stereo Buyer's Guide" in big letters right on the cover. If our '70s-era time-travelers took a tour of today's Crutchfield website, they'd find TVs with screens up to 98", and 4K or even 8K screen resolution, as well as 4K digital projectors.
And home theater receivers with the power and processing to handle up to a dozen speakers, including side, rear, and overhead effects speakers, plus one or two subwoofers.
These technologies create a home theater experience that rivals or even surpasses typical movie theaters, in every way but size. Getting to today's amazing picture and sound quality took time, and the innovations often came in fits and starts rather than a smooth power glide.
We also offered stand-alone Dolby processors that could be added to existing systems to create surround sound. Dolby Surround was a 4-channel system: right and left fronts, a center channel for dialogue, and a single surround channel that was split and sent to a pair of surround speakers. Launched in , Dolby Pro Logic wasn't a different surround sound format, but rather an improved method for processing existing Dolby soundtracks.
A Pro Logic decoder used "steering logic" to raise and lower the volume of each channel independently, providing more precise placement of dialogue, music, and effects. Dolby Surround and Pro Logic were analog audio technologies that tried to make the most of two matrixed channels of sound — four channels of sound squeezed into two channels, then unfolded by the processor during playback. As its name suggests, Dolby Digital employs digital audio to create surround sound with six separate or "discrete" channels — front right, left, and center, independent right and left surrounds, plus an LFE low-frequency effects channel to feed a subwoofer.
This system provided a huge improvement in overall sound quality, with much higher signal-to-noise and channel separation, as well as much more precise placement of sounds. This "5. In , Batman Returns was the first theatrical movie released in Dolby Digital. Although Dolby Digital soundtracks eventually found their way to home theater via laserdiscs, the format didn't really take off until the launch of DVD in Dolby Digital was the standard audio format for DVD.
Receivers with built-in Dolby Digital processing quickly followed. The biggest home theater news in was the introduction of DVD discs and players.
DVDs not only provided a higher resolution picture x pixels but also featured 5. DVD's picture was twice as sharp as VHS tape and sharper than laserdisc — the reference-quality source at the time. A DVD could fit a 2-hour movie on a single disc side, and when you were finished watching a movie, you didn't have to rewind it!
In the early days of DVD, the discs weren't easy to find or buy, so Crutchfield carried a selection of a few hundred titles. The introduction of DVD in remains one of the most important technological innovations for home theater.
It provided crystal-clear digital picture and sound, and it was more convenient to use than the analog videotape and laserdisc formats it replaced. Although many DVD-Audio and SACD discs were in stereo, these were the first formats since quadraphonic to attempt to bring multichannel surround music into the home.
DVD-Audio only lasted for a few years, but SACD is still around today, although interest in the format is mostly limited to the audiophile community. Although it took the better part of a decade to roll out, the transition to digital TV broadcasts in the U. The mandatory nationwide transition from analog to digital TV broadcasts was a unique event for both the broadcasting and consumer electronics industries.
A change of that magnitude takes time, and the final deadline for all of the nation's TV stations to fully switch to digital and shut off their analog signals didn't arrive until June Those early flat-panel TVs were super expensive, with picture quality that outperformed tube TVs in some ways, but was unimpressive by today's standards.
In the early years of the transition to digital HDTV, Crutchfield's catalogs and website were among the most dependable sources of accurate, in-depth information. The picture was pixilated and suffered from lots of other artifacts.
Barely watchable compared to even the cheapest TVs available today. The demo was run by video guru Joe Kane, and it featured a live p broadcast of one of ABC's morning shows, projected on a screen using a tweaked-out CRT projector.
The clarity, color, and overall realism were simply breathtaking. I still remember it vividly. The next real home theater breakthrough came with yet another format war. Both formats offered reference-quality picture — full HD p — and terrific sound quality extending up to 7.
This time they prevailed, and Blu-ray is still going strong today. HD DVD's brief life ended in No analog connections could support those high data rates. The answer was HDMI. The HDMI standard was introduced in Initially, this all-digital, copy-protected, single-cable connection was designed to carry DVD picture and sound, but its capabilities expanded over the years to meet the needs of higher-resolution video and audio formats. HDMI cables are still essential for connecting home theater gear.
The newest HDMI version — 2. We've looked at developments on the sound side of home theater, and discussed several of the key sources, moving from broadcasts to tapes to discs. Now it's TV's turn. Although TVs and projectors lagged in the transition to digital high-definition entertainment, the past twenty years have brought an incredible transformation of the home viewing experience.
That was true whether it was the single large picture tube in a TV, or the separate red, green, and blue CRT "guns" of front- and rear-projection displays. CRTs were capable of producing beautiful high-def images, but they could get expensive, even for screen sizes that seem small by today's standards.
And CRT-based projection systems were large, heavy, and often required regular maintenance. In fact, Blumlein's work on coincident stereo has remained the foundation and fabric of all domestic stereo replay systems, as well as many common studio and location recording techniques, which have remained completely unchanged in 70 years!
The work of Bell Labs can also be traced directly to the top of the family tree of replay formats employed universally in the cinema industry — particularly in the use of a third, front-centre channel to localise dialogue and key actions to the centre of the vast projection screens used during the first heyday of the worldwide film industry.
The first public use of genuine, discrete-track surround sound — in the context that we would understand today — was by Walt Disney in his famously surreal animation film, Fantasia, which married animated mini-features to excerpts of popular orchestral music.
The conductor for the original production, Leopold Stokowski, had previously been working closely with Bell Labs in their development of various advanced music recording systems and techniques, and it was inevitable that he would act as a conduit for their expertise in the Disney project. These combined talents and resources proved inspirational, and led directly to the realisation of what can only be described as a technological masterpiece, over 60 years ago!
For the first time in cinematic history, a film's sound stage was designed to completely surround the audience — up to eight separate music and effects tracks were mixed and panned, live, during each performance see above. Obviously, cinemas were not equipped to handle such complex or pioneering technical requirements, so Disney toured the film across the United States, complete with its own technical crew and reproduction system christened Fantasound , to great acclaim.
Unfortunately, the 'roadshow' was brought to a premature end by America's entry into World War II, and this innovative surround-sound technology was never used again in the same form.
Disney and Bell Labs were undoubtedly the first pioneers of surround sound, and had to develop many original techniques and technologies for the project. For example, to be able to pan sounds around the auditorium they actually had to invent pan pots, as nothing like them had existed before. They also had to invent multitrack audio recorders so that different orchestral sections could be replayed, and therefore positioned, independently.
To obtain sufficient separation to allow the various orchestral sections to be manipulated independently, they also developed close-microphone techniques, overdubbing, and even click-tracks — all techniques we take for granted today, but revolutionary at the time. The advent of magnetic film soundtracks in the s maintained a limited degree of surround technology in the cinema.
The popular 35mm Cinemascope films employed four tracks, for example, and there were six on the prestigious 70mm Todd-AO format. Both of these mainly used the additional tracks to allow side and rear sound effects, in addition to the widely adopted three frontal channels.
The first time surround sound raised its head in the consumer environment was with quadraphonic or quad systems in the s. Once again, the introduction of these new formats was principally driven by hardware manufacturers, who were trying to expand the market after it reached near-saturation with stereo record and tape players.
Unfortunately, the whole quad era was a commercial disaster, principally brought about by far too many incompatible formats and a very confused public, but also because the fundamental concept didn't actually work very well!
At this time, surround sound meant four channels — essentially a conventional stereo pair at the front and another at the rear, with the angle between adjacent speakers being 90 degrees. Conventional stereo requires the loudspeakers to subtend an angle of 30 degrees either side of the centre line of the listening position to produce the most coherent and stable stereo imaging. Even if you manage to remain in the incredibly narrow 'sweet spot', the imaging is highly unstable and distorted unrealistically.
This is precisely the problem encountered with quad systems — only made all the worse by suffering not only unstable frontal imaging, but also virtually non-existent side and rear imaging. Essentially, sound tended to puddle unconvincingly around the speakers, or leap about disconcertingly when panned around.
At the time, little had been done in the way of scientific research into the psychoacoustic effectiveness of such a system, and not much was known about how human hearing deduces directional information. The bottom line was that most Quadraphonic systems failed to reproduce anything remotely convincing by way of a surround soundstage. In particular, achieving stable and solid images across the sides proved to be a major hurdle, and the systems only worked at all if the listener remained in a very small, highly impractical 'sweet-spot'.
Although there were a couple of bespoke, discrete four-channel tape-based systems quad reel-to-reel and eight-track cartridge formats , most quadraphonic systems involved some form of signal matrixing. In this context, the idea of a matrix is to combine the original four sound channels — corresponding to the signals required in each of the four loudspeakers — into typically two channels for recording or transmission. This is normally done in such a way that the resulting two-channel signal remains broadly compatible with conventional stereo and mono replay — in other words, it is 'backwards compatible'.
This was the idea with domestic quad systems — that by employing stereo matrixing, they could offer playback of quad, stereo and mono records from the same record player. Environmental sounds, such as thunder, rain, wind, and waves fill the sound field much better than in DD or DTS. For example, instead of hearing the rain coming from several directions, the points in the sound field between those directions are filled out, thus placing you within the rainstorm, not just listening to it.
Circle Surround provides an enhancement of Dolby Digital and similar surround sound source material without degrading the original intent of the surround sound mix. Circle Surround II takes this concept further by adding an additional rear center channel, thus providing an anchor for sounds emanating from directly behind the listener. Surround Sound is not limited to large multi-channel systems. It can also be applied to headphone listening. SRS Labs, Dolby Labs, and Yamaha all have incorporated surround sound technology with the headphone listening environment.
Normally, when listening to audio either music or movies the sound seems to originate from within your head, which is unnatural. Dolby Headphone SRS Headphone, Yamaha Silent Cinema, and Smyth Research employ technology that not only gives the listener an enveloping sound, but removes it from the listener's headspace and places it in the front and side spaces around the head, which is more like listening to a regular speaker-based surround sound system. And it is still backwards compatible with older 5.
Although building on the foundation established by previous Dolby Surround Sound formats, Dolby Atmos frees sound mixers and listeners from the limitations of speakers and channels by putting the emphasis on where sound needs to placed within a three-dimensional environment. Additional advanced surround sound formats include:. Today's surround sound experience is the result of decades of evolution. The surround sound experience is now easily accessible, practical, and affordable for home theater enthusiasts, with more to come in the future.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Robert Silva. Robert Silva has extensive experience in consumer electronics and home theater product sales and sales supervision; he has written about audio, video, and home theater topics since Robert has articles published on HBO.
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on March 12, Tweet Share Email. In This Article. What Is Monophonic Sound? What Is Stereophonic Sound? The Stereophonic Process. Limitations of Stereo Sound. Four-Channel Discrete Sound. Quadraphonic Sound. Emergence of Dolby Surround. Dolby Surround Sound for the Home. Dolby Surround Basics. Limits of Dolby Surround. Dolby Pro Logic. Limits of Dolby Pro-logic.
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