Classe Audio SSP-800/CT-SSP Manual

A SERVICE OF

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30

Understanding Surround Sound

Today’ssophisticatedsurroundsoundsystemshavespawnedabewildering

arrayoftechnologiesandacronyms.Inthissection,we’llgiveyouabasic

understandingofwhatallthatjargonmeans.Asaresult,you’llbebetter

equipped to take advantage of the best that home entertainment has to oer.

how many channels? Today’shomeentertainmentsystemsreproducesoundtracksthatinclude

anything from one to eight separate channels of information. Examples include:

• Watchingmonomovies,suchasCasablanca or e Wizard of

Oz, having only a single channel of audio information in the

soundtrack.

• ListeningtoamusicalCD,whichistypicallystereoor2-channel

sound.

• WatchingtheoriginalStar Wars in the original Dolby Surround

Pro Logic format, which is four channels of information derived

from two channels.

• WatchingarecentmovieorT.V.showina5.1-channelor

7.1-channel surround format, which identies that the source

material has either ve or seven full-range signals for the front,

surround, and rear speakers plus the .1 signal for the Low

Frequency Eects (LFE), also referred to as the LFE channel, for

the subwoofer.

Your SSP handles all of these tasks with ease, switching to an appropriate

processing mode automatically upon sensing the nature of the incoming signal.

However, you may still have to select from the available choices. For example,

disc-based media often contains multiple soundtracks with varying numbers of

channels and even dierent languages. Because you may have to choose the one

you want to hear using the menu of the media itself, you should know what

jargonyou’lllikelysee.

matrix or discrete? When movie-makers rst wanted to expand beyond simple stereo (left and right

audio channels), they had a problem - the entire infrastructure on which they

depended was stereo.

Dolby Laboratories solved that problem with a system called Dolby

®

Surround

that embedded two extra channels of audio sound into the existing stereo pair

so that specialized circuitry could retrieve the extra information with reasonable

accuracy. is technique, whereby channels are mixed together with the

intention of separating them later, is called matrix encoding and decoding.

e disadvantage, as you might expect, is that it is dicult to completely and

perfectly separate two channels that have been mixed together.