Those of us who are of a certain age, will remember listening to records in mono and the fantastic excitement of listening to a piece of music for the first time in stereo.

Suddenly instead of the music coming from one mono directional source, we were confronted with a 180 degree stereo picture of the sound. Orchestras came alive, you felt like you were actually sitting in the audience at a concert. Popular music was given a whole new lease of life, as producers and bands started to experiment with the possibilities stereo recordings afforded.

With the advent of DVD Audio, Super Audio CDs and DVDs, we can now add a further 180 degrees to the sound picture, and truly be surrounded by the music. The jump from stereo to surround is an even greater enhancement to the listening experience than the jump from mono to stereo – let me explain why.

Let’s use the recording of an orchestra in a large church as an example and assume that the recordings were perfectly executed. The orchestra in the stereo recording is recorded with two mikes and although they pick up most of the ambience and echo reflections, once reproduced on a stereo system, the maximum sound picture available would be 180 degrees. Given that most people listen to music with the speakers in front of them this stereo picture is further reduced to – say typically 90 degrees. The surround sound recording uses four sound field mikes, and picks up all the ambience and echo reflections, the difference being, that once this is reproduced on a four channel system, the 360 degree sound picture is faithfully reproduced. The positioning of the speakers is also less critical, and in any case will not effectively degrade the surround sound picture. Now we come to another interesting bit of information.

You have probably noticed that so far, I have only been talking about four speakers, whereas 5.1 Surround Sound is comprised of six. The other two speakers are a centre speaker and a subwoofer. These two speakers do a very important job specifically in the reproduction of popular music. First of all, I’ll deal with the subwoofer.

In a 5.1 mix, the bass frequencies are routed to the subwoofer. In a popular music mix this could be typically the Bass and the Bass drum. These low frequencies are now removed from the stereo pair, cancelling out any low frequency interference or modulation with the signal, resulting in a cleaner and less cluttered sound. The centre speaker can be used for many purposes but typically it is used as a dedicated speaker for the vocals. The vocals are then free from any modulation from other instruments, resulting once again in a cleaner and more faithful reproduction. Add to this the fact that the job of reproducing the sound is now spread between six speakers, as opposed to two, and you can begin to see, that even with a very basic set up, the sound experience is going to be vastly improved.

All DVDs will play DVD Audio CDs and the price of DVD players that will play Super audio CDs is coming down all the time. The only draw back at the moment, is that record companies have not fully embraced the medium yet, so there is not a lot of product on the market – but this will change. You can play DVD audio CDs on your DVD surround system, but to fully enjoy the benefits the medium offers, you should have a dedicated six channel amplifier connected to the speakers. These are surprisingly inexpensive, for instance mine, which is a Sherwood, cost about £80. The speakers should really be hi-fi speakers, but they don’t have to be top of the range for it to sound truly wonderful. Subwoofers and centre speakers can start as low as £20, and they seem to work perfectly well. The stereo pairs (front and back) can be made up of your existing hi-fi speakers plus any old speakers you have lying around from systems that don’t work anymore!

Now that I’ve inspired you to invest in a 5.1 Surround system, you’ll need something to try it out on, and I can think of no better album than “Aria futura” for this purpose.

Happy listening and all the best,

Darryl and Stephen Verisma.