Surround Sound Experiment (Patreon)

TL;DR - I set up some extra speakers in a quad arrangement in the studio and mixed a test ambient-only track. If you have a surround setup like this in the place you game, please give this a test and let me know how it went!

Greeting Patrons,

I've been playing around with speaker configurations and I had this crazy idea. Last month, I purchased my first new studio monitors in 20 years and I've been loving them. But I found myself with an extra set of speakers. So, last weekend, I installed my old monitors in a surround configuration. Technically it's quadrophonic (4.0) and not the usual home theater 5.1 which includes a center channel and an LFE (sub) channel. (In 5.1 most movie ambiences are limited to 4 channels anyway as the Center is reserved for dialog and the LFE for the booms)

I know next to nothing about this format other than I enjoy the occasional helicopter whizz-by when I'm watching movies.  I've done a lot of reading, video watching, and head-scratching at this point and I was going to start this whole thing by having a poll where you would let me know if you had a multi-channel setup at home, or in your gaming space or what-have-you.

My gut tells me that most of you probably don't, but the few of you who do are really into it.

I don't know if this will become a thing or if I can even figure out the workflow.  There's so much I don't know.  But I thought I'd give you all a peek at the first test run, which works great here but I honestly have no idea whether it will translate.

I've attached 2 files. The first is a short 5.0 (no LFE/sub-track) test file that will say the names of the speakers it's currently playing out of.  If this works, the campsite track will work also.

The second file is a 5-minute ambience-only 5.0 track of a campsite I created with some lovely surround sound wind, some distant thunder, a horse that lazily circles you as it grazes, a campfire with a cookstove, and assorted wildlife. I did absolutely nothing in terms of eq and the levels are probably way off (I kept them purposely low) so treat this as a proof of concept.

The track order is based on what I believe is the most common convention/configuration for 5.0: Left, Right, Center, (Sub), Left Surround, Right Surround. It's rendered as 5.1 with the 4th channel empty. So a 5.1 file with empty channels 3 and 4.

All of this of course is provided you have a computer connected to a compatible audio system using a digital cable. I can't provide much (or anything really) in the way of tech support but I will say that Foobar 2000 (available for free on Mac/PC) plays this file perfectly. If you do get this working and wouldn't mind sharing your setup tips I'm sure people would appreciate it.

Best,

Tim