[bigshot]

Yes it's the same. Multichannel mixes are expensive to produce. They recycle them in all the various formats since no one format is dominant.

 

[Strangelove424]

That's interesting. Didn't even think about how much it would cost to produce. Do you happen to have any info or even pictures of official multichannel music studios and what standards they go by for placement, angling, etc.? 

 

[bigshot]

I only worked on a mixing stage for multichannel once. It looked kinda like this...
 

 
The thing is, you can remaster something from the mix downs. You don't have to go into all the elements and completely rebuild the mix from the ground up. With multichannel you have to do that.

 

[Strangelove424]

Daaaamn that looks nice. Do you guys honor THX standards (for angles and such) or are music setups for surround different?... I see a screen and seating area, so am curious if this is a multipurpose setup for movie sound track mixes too? And the new mix downs are for the different timings, avoiding phase conflicts, separating LFE?

 

[bigshot]

I'm sure all the mixing stages are THX certified. There isn't enough work doing multichannel for music, so I don't think there are dedicated multichannel music studios.

 

[Strangelove424]

Good point. You can hear the criquets chirping at the multi channel music section at Best Buy. But I think it might turn around with the proliferation of surround sound at home. I hope it will atleast. If a multi channel mix is really good you kinda feel it could be the next step from mono and then stereo. Other 5.1 mixes, not so much and you wanna run back to stereo. 

 

[Krutsch]

  I'm sure all the mixing stages are THX certified. There isn't enough work doing multichannel for music, so I don't think there are dedicated multichannel music studios.

 
I hope that changes; the works I've been buying from Steven Wilson have made me a believer in good multi-channel music.  Wilson's remixes of Jethro Tull and Yes are fantastic (assuming one likes the music).

 

[bigshot]

Another dud...
 

 
You would think Pink Floyd would be the perfect candidate for multichannel, but it really isn't. The original LPs had VERY complex mixes, with sound effects, music and a swirling array of phasey ambiences drifting in and out from bar to bar. The problem is, when they go to build a 5.1 mix, they're starting from scratch on all that. Trying to guess how effects were created thirty years down the road is just about impossible. Pink Floyd used every engineering trick in the book, and often completely different techniques were carefully dovetailed together and they changed with every verse and chorus. I can only guess at the time and thought process that went into mixing these albums, along with input from engineers, producers and the band themselves. When a 5:1 mix is done, too often they just hand the masters and the stereo mix to a single engineer and say, "Here. Make 5.1 out of this." Good luck getting anything close to the original sound with that approach.
 
One of the first thing I learned about sound mixing was that everything starts with the vocal track. The first pass at the mix is balancing the vocals... compressing them so the consonants all read clearly, making sure they are all at a consistent level. Then you go in and start laying in the various levels... drums and bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, keyboards, etc. At each stage, you do little adjustments, smoothly dipping a track a little for a fraction of a second to poke a hole for a particularly important word in the lyrics to have a clear space to read. Listening to the finished mix, you have no idea how many tiny edits it took for a big pile of sounds to all read clearly without bumping into each other or sitting on top of something important. When you pull the original elements and try to recreate that, inevitably you end up with sloppiness... wallpapering in layers without finessing them at all. That's what we have here.
 
Anyone who grew up in the 70s (and smoked pot) knows every inch of every Pink Floyd album by heart. That makes it doubly difficult, because you have to compete with the original mix that is embedded in a whole generation's brains. As I sat down to listen to this, I immediately flashed back to when this album came out and I played it on my turntable. I think it came wrapped in opaque blue shrink wrap, so you couldn't see the cover inside. It didn't matter because the sticker on the front said, "Pink Floyd's new album" which was all kids my age needed to know to pull out the five bucks and buy it.
 
As I listened to the beginning, I recognized the specific guitar licks and vocals, but I had to strain to hear them. The mix was thick overall, nothing was highlighted. The vocals were recessed and muddy sounding. You had to strain to hear the lyrics. Musical accents that used to be foregrounded were now buried under the sludge like basic track. Worst of all, the carefully dovetailing kaleidoscope of ambiences were replaced by a handful of digital reverb settings that cut in and out with obvious potting up and down. Yes, the requisite "flying around the room" stuff is there in Welcome to the Machine, but a lot of the other tracks have stuff flying all over, and it didn't work at all. For instance in one song, a guitar solo was broken into four bars and each bar was played through a different speaker. That made the solo completely disjointed, as if there were four guitarists finishing each others' sentences like Huey, Dewie and Louie.
 
It was pretty clear what happened here. Some poor engineer got handed a "no win" situation, and didn't have the budget or resources to start from the ground up the way good mixes are built. Instead, he built it all at once from all the pieces and just tried to dial in and out stock ambiences to approximate the sound on the album. Then he pulled some bits out and threw them around the four corners of the room and called it a day.
 
It really made me appreciate the Elton John SACDs. Those are completely true to the original mixes, and I bet the way they accomplished that was to bring together the original people who made the albums in the first place and had them do the surround mix, not just some anonymous engineer whose only connection was that he went to a Pink Floyd concert once when he was a kid.
 
This one is a mess. Don't waste your money on it. Just buy the standard CD on this. It sounds great.

 

[Krutsch]

  Another dud...
 

 
<snip, snip>
 
This one is a mess. Don't waste your money on it. Just buy the standard CD on this. It sounds great.

 
Oops... too late, I already purchased this disc, but have yet to give it a listen.  Now, my expectations will be appropriately lowered 

 

[Strangelove424]

Enjoyed the Pink Floyd review very much, it brought back memories listening to them when I was younger. It was a ritual for my friends and I, and often a smokey one at that. The music really carried me away from the start though, and I always thought of them as a very emotional band, not just a trippy one, although they certainly earned that designation too. Wish You Were Here is my 2nd or 3rd favorite album of theirs so this is disappointing. My experience with the Dark Side of the Moon 5.1 SACD was different, but they might have thrown some major cash into that because that album is so popular, and I think it was the 30th Anniversary. The sound was well defined spatially, keeping the surrounds limited mostly to instruments and pans between speakers slow. I was expecting a slew of surround craziness, but the songs themselves were subdued and didn't overly challenge the version "embedded" in my head. It's interesting you pointed that out, because it's hard not to think about the stereo version listening to surround sound if you know the album really well. But Dark Side of the Moon actually made me think at times, "maybe this is the best way to listen to Pink Floyd". If 5.1 had been popularized sooner, I have no doubt they would have jumped on it like the Beatles jumped on stereo (for better or for worse). 

 

[Krutsch]

 

"...because it's hard not to think about the stereo version listening to surround sound if you know the album really well."

 
That may be what @bigshot  is referring to what he wrote his excellent review of the CD.  However, well engineered 5.1 mixes don't do that.
 
I have been listening to the newly up-matrixed and re-mixed version of Yes "Close to the Edge" (Steven Wilson, 2013).  I know that album like the back of my hand and the 5.1 version just makes the walls disappear, as opposed to creating a lot of gimmicky ping-pong effects.  I have a number of Wilson's 5.1 mixes and he (or his team) really understands how to do this right.

 

[Strangelove424]

Just found an interesting interview with Bob Katz where he mentioned surround sound a few times in a very positive light.  
 
http://www.head-fi.org/t/37066/exclusive-interview-with-bob-katz-great-reading
 
These are some quotes:
 
"The future is going to be surround sound, and it is kind of sad that people may forget that it is possible to capture great depth and space with proper use of stereo. Listen to some of my recordings on Chesky to see what I mean. But I look forward to the surround future, provided that mixing engineers learn how to use surround as more than just multichannel mono.."
 
"I think that surround is the future. Even my best stereo recordings suffer without the surround portion and come more alive when the space is expanded to around you. However, I have invented a very natural stereo to surround processor (available from Z Systems) that can take a well-recorded stereo recording that already has good space, and reproduce it in surround indistinguishable from if the recording had been made in surround already. This, of course, for recordings that do not have discrete instruments in the surrounds. By the way, I am a big fan of localization and too many surround recordings are making the front picture too vague for my tastes, in order to impress the casual listener."

 

[Krutsch]

  By the way, I am a big fan of localization and too many surround recordings are making the front picture too vague for my tastes, in order to impress the casual listener."

 
Very nice post... thanks for sharing.  The highlighted portion above has been my experience with many 5.1 music recordings.  They are trying too hard to impress the causal listener with "...wow, footsteps coming from behind...", which was cool when Pink Floyd did it with DSoM (in the 70s, in stereo no less, going from side to side).  But by now, everyone has been trained by movie theaters and home theaters (for some) to expect an out-of-body, multi-channel audio experience.  Per the above comment, I expect audio engineers to over focus on "sound effects" instead of more realistic sound staging.
 
Again, per my earlier post, Steven Wilson seems to create a 5.1 experience that just sounds like a really wide/deep sound stage and I hope others learn from that approach as pop music moves towards offering more multi-channel titles.

 

[bigshot]

I just ordered blu-ray 5.1 reworkings of XTC's Drums and Wires and Nonsuch. The packages looked jam packed with not just 5.1 mixes, but new stereo mixes, dozens of songs deleted from the original albums (it looks like drums and wires was going to be a 2 record set at one point), rock videos and live concert footage. If they have a blu-ray to work with, they should really pack it with interesting stuff like this.

 

[Krutsch]

Received Soundgarden "Superunknown" a couple of weeks ago; 1 BD + 4 CDs.  The surround mixes are stunning for some of the songs and others... well, not bad but not great either. I suppose it depends on the source material that was available to the mixing engineer. "Super unknown" is a desert disc for me, so I was thrilled and the songs that sound great are my favorite tracks, so win-win.
 
But, the best part was the rehearsal/demo tracks on one of the CDs; wow, for some of these tracks I really enjoyed the earlier, unpublished versions.  Expensive, but a lot of value for me.
 
I have also ordered a similar package for Tears for Fears "Songs From The Big Chair" (Super Deluxe Edition) [4CD + 2DVD].
 
For music you love and have listed to a zillion times, it's really great to hear alternate takes.