Most advice columns tell you exactly how to go about doing your mix. But I'm not going to do that here. Why? Because I'm too humble?

Maybe, but that's not the main reason. The main reason is that you, with your forward-thinking personality and your quest for the ultimate fun, have decided to get into Surround, a new frontier forged by pioneers who make their own rules. That's right, many of the "how to's" in Surround are yet undecided, and wide open to creative approaches.

The Studio Setup
First, let's consider your studio's Surround speaker setup. If you lived in an ideal world, you would have this speaker arrangement.

Ideal speaker arrangement

Your front left and right speakers would have the classic 45 degree stereo spread. The rear speakers would have the same angles and distance. The front center speaker would be moved forward to give it the same distance from the listener as the other four speakers, to avoid any problems with phasing and proximity loudness.

This is the arrangement that many of the first Surround studios have chosen.

Now WAKE UP! Time to snap out of this dream and join the real world. The real world is the world where the millions of listeners are going to enjoy your awesome recording on their home Surround systems.

For starters, the home system is not going to have the front speaker moved forward to make it equal distance, unless the devoted listener takes out a wall. In fact, the average studio won't be able to move the center speaker forward. This results in a setup much more like this:

More typical

But even this is not going to be America's typical home living room. In a more average home, the listener will be sitting on the couch against the back wall. That makes it impossible to move the back speakers to the rear of the listener, or at least not by much. So the most common listening setup is likely to be more like this:

Most common

The REAL bottom line is that you recording will be played on systems with many different configurations, and you want your recording to work as well as possible on all of them. The best way to approach this is to do you recording on a system that has automated Surround mixing (such as Mx51), and take a "final" mix and burn it onto a CD in DTS or Dolby format, and go visit every friend you have that's fortunate enough to have a home theater system. You will learn very quickly what works on some systems and what works on other systems (and what works the best on a wide range of sytems). After you listen, go back to your automated mix, do some tweeks, then go do some more listening.

Don't Forget the Downmix!
Yes, don't forget that the playback system will automatically downmix your precious recording to stereo (you remember, that 2-channel stuff your parents listened to) if the system has only 2 speakers. And radio stations will also be doing downmixing to get the sound out through 2 channels. So you need to be certain that your mix can survive downmixing and still sound good.

Again, with your Surround CD in hand, hit the "stereo" button on your friend's home stereo decoder. This will put it into downmix mode, and you can check it out.

Don't Forget Car Sound Systems!!!!
This one here is especially important, since people spend lots of time listening in their cars. The first people to do Surround recordings were surprised to find out something they hadn't considered. Surround recordings can sound radically differnt in cars, and here's why.

One of the ways people like to mix to Surround is to put the soundstage in front, and to use the rear speakers for some carefully created ambience, at a much lower level than the front speakers. In cars, however, we are now all used to speakers in the four corners, with the rear speakers at the same volume level as the fronts (if not louder). Now pop in a Surround recording with just a little ambience out of the rears. What do you get? The soundfield collapses to the front of the car, and you just have a line of sound across your dashboard. And not even a very good one, since you can't be sitting in the "sweet spot" and still be in control of your car.

What should you do about this? Once again, make a Surround mix, and find a friend who has a true Surround system in their car. DTS-decoded car Surround systems are just now coming on the market, so these will be showing up in cars more and more.

The Bottom Line
Get out and listen to you Surround mix in as many different situations as you can. This can be great fun for you and your friends, and you learn how to give your fans the best possible mix, no matter what system they have.

Jeff Wilson works for Minnetonka Audio Software, maker of software for professional sound recording and editing. He can be reached at jeff@minnetonkasoftware.com.