Kingston said:
I barely understand the point of 5.1 in movies - so little of the potential is ever used and center speaker pretty much does everything.
Well, I don't think that's true.
I'll grant you that it depends on the film you're watching, but any well-mixed film, either originally in 5.1 or better yet, 7.1 or Atmos, will have content intelligently laid out between all channels. And in a sense the industry has become streamlined and "standardized" so that more and more films use it wisely, even if conservatively.
In my opinion it's really easy. Dialog comes mostly from the center channel, which is as it should be. The rest is spread out over the remaining four speaker channels and the LFE channel provides some nice low-end effects. Simply A/B-ing a film's stereo mix with its 5.1 mix and you should notice the difference between them. To me it's at worst subtle, and at best a tremendous difference. To me, it's like my whole room "collapses" to a flat 2D wall at the front when I turn 5.1 off. That's not to say that stereo mixes can't sound great, they can, but to say that their potential is never used or that the center does everything is in my experience not correct at all. Heck, if the center does everything, then you should be able to solo that channel and hear a film that is almost unchanged compared to having all channels on. But I'm telling you, the second you do you lose the sense of space, and you lose music, and you lose backgrounds etc.
That is of course not even talking about more aggressive panning where sources actually travel through space, from say the old Blade Runner or Apocalypse Now to Gravity or something similar.
Kingston said:
But for any normal house no matter the size they are interior design pollution and look and function bad. A major area of the room is dedicated and shaped to this unholy altar of technology.
There is exactly one person who gets the full experience in any room with 5.1. The rest is listening to a skewed combination of surround effect artifacts.
I agree. There are clear practical issues with surround sound. But the same is true for stereo. If you have a wide enough tv/screen, and spread your L/R wide enough to the side of it, then when you sit off-center the dialog is going to sound like it's coming not from the mouth of the character from beside him/her. Same problem with a "phantom center" in stereo as is any thing spread out over the other four channels in 5.1. But at least with 5.1 anyone at any place in the room will hear the voices come mostly from their mouths or very close to it. I'd say that's a benefit; the ability to anchor any sound "in the screen".
There are speaker systems though that don't look like crap, and I think it's a choice a person just has to make; better sound or better aesthetics. In addition to that, Dolby Atmos Home is popping up in the market, and the question is how far this will go. I could see an intelligent system in the future where a much greater number of smaller wireless satellites could be place around the room, and then wirelessly talk to the main unit which then allocates sound in a 3D space just as Atmos does. Sufficiently small speakers at a low enough price could make that a possibility actually.
