On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 06:01:33 -0700, Scott Dorsey wrote
(in article ):
In the late eighties this sort of thing was all the rage. Everybody wanted
to
make their own matrix surround tracks and nobody wanted to pay Dolby the
licensing fee for the encoder. There were lots of aftermarket fake Dolby
encoders sold, and a lot of homebrews. But now we have 5.1 and nobody much
bothers with any of that junk except as an afterthought for the occasional
film optical track.
------------------------------snip------------------------------
Yes, this brings back memories of the 1980s with Ultra-Stereo, which I
believe was Jack Cashin's attempt to get around Dolby's patents and creating
a compatible (and much cheaper) matrixed surround system with a similar
noise-reduction encoding. I believe engineer John Mosely was also a
consultant for the company; Mosely had previously worked on Quintaphonic
sound in the mid-1970s. Interestingly, Dolby could not patent the surround
encoding itself, but did patent the noise reduction encoding (either Type A
or Type B, depending on the release format), which Ultra Stereo had to mimic
for their release prints. I used Ultra Stereo a few times in mastering, and
it actually worked OK.
To the o.p.: lots of books have the information necessary in order to
simulate a matrix surround mix. Dolby's own white paper is he
http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/zz-
_Shared_Assets/English_PDFs/Professional/214_Mixing%20with%20Dolby%20Pro%20Log
ic%20II%20Technology.pdf
Tom Holman's book SURROUND SOUND: UP AND RUNNING also covers this in detail:
http://www.amazon.com/Surround-Sound-Second-Up-
running/dp/0240808290/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343514433&sr=1-2
But in general, I agree with Scott -- I don't think matrix surround has any
point today, in the face of so many ways of discrete surround mixing and
digital release formats. Many DVD and Blu-ray releases are "upmixed" or
"unwrapped" in advance to take old 2-channel mixes and convert them to 5.1.
Done skillfully and with care, these can actually sound much better than any
of the old Dolby Matrix releases.
http://www.sersc.org/journals/IJSIP/vol2_no4/7.pdf
--MFW