Back to Surround, Part 1

Back to Surround, Part 2

Prowling for Surround

Mike Mettler is editor in chief of S&V’s sister publication, Mobile Entertainment.

Back to Surround, Part 1
"Musicians are welcoming the mobile audio 5.1 market with open arms and open ears."
Illustration by John Ueland


One of the more exciting mobile developments at trade shows this year was the re-emergence of DVD-Audio as a viable format for the car environment. I say “re-emergence” because a DVD-A-compatible head unit was introduced by Panasonic a few years back, but no one else followed suit. For a while, it seemed DVD-A for the car was DOA.

But at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, three companies — Eclipse, Kenwood, and Pioneer — announced DVD-A-ready heads, and all was right with the world. This is, of course, great news for those of us who have long enjoyed the surround sound experience in cars, mostly via movies or concert DVDs — as well as for those who’ve only experienced it at home, or not at all. (SACD is another issue entirely, by the way. Sony tells me there are no current plans to introduce a car-specific SACD player. The company says it will someday, but there’s no official timetable yet. That’s a shame.)

Musicians and producers are welcoming the mobile audio 5.1 market with open arms and open ears. At a press conference last fall, I asked Peter Gabriel what he thought of surround sound in the car, and he told me, “It has a lot of potential. The car is where 5.1-channel sound will prosper.” And engineer/ producer Elliot Sheiner, who’s worked on surround releases for the likes of Steely Dan and R.E.M., recently told The New York Times that when he first heard surround sound, he thought the car was the perfect environment for it. “You get DVD-Audio in the car,” he said, “and people will want it in their home.” The good news is, Sheiner is currently working with Panasonic on a DVD-A system for the car environment,

Bob Michaels, president of 5.1 Production Services in Los Angeles, spends up to 16 hours a week on the road just commuting, so in his mind, surround sound and the car are a perfect marriage. “Here, we can seatbelt somebody in and control the sound around them instead of them having to move couches around,” he says. “What we do in the studio is what we want to achieve in the car. When we share the mixes with the artists, they tell us, ‘This is exactly how I hear my music when I’m onstage.’ ”

Al Jourgensen, co-mastermind of the pioneering alternative industrial-metal group Ministry, concurs. (Jourgensen helped mix the 5.1-channel version of his band’s current album, Animositisomina [Sanctuary], and Michaels was the executive producer.) “The cool thing is,” says Jourgensen, “5.1 is the way I hear the music in my head — in a 360° scope. After hearing this mix, the light bulb went off in my head. It’s added another dimension, another element to what I’ll do in the future. All of my mixing will be geared toward that.

“I like listening to Animositisomina in the car much better than I do at home,” Jourgensen continues. “The ambience and the true intent of the songs are distorted if you listen to them in too wide of a room — too much space. To my ears, this album’s 5.1 mix works much, much better in a car.”

It’s easy to understand why. Animositisomina opens with the hard-driving “Animosity,” which immediately envelops the listener in a swirl of metal riffs, percussion, and a swooping helicopter that may make you duck in your seat more than once. “It’s flying all around you,” marvels Michaels. “When all of the drums and bass kick in, it goes right to the middle of your stomach.”

The buzzing guitar line that does a 360 during the intro to “Impossible” is a sample of a riff played by Jourgensen that was looped and then run through a “very overloaded” parametric equalizer. And the DVD-A’s epic closing track, “Leper,” is awash in organic sounds, such as a razor blade clicking on a mirror and samples of actual train noises. It all sounds great in the car.

So is the car environment the ultimate destination for surround music? “It’s one of the final frontiers that will overwhelm the consumer market, just like DVD-Video players have,” predicts Michaels. “You’re already seeing it with in-dash DVD players, which are approaching the price level where high-end CD heads once were [under $2,000]. And now you can get DVD changers, too. Don’t forget that all of these players are capable of playing any DVD-Audio disc. This is, after all, a consumer product that can upgrade with you.”

We’re just getting started on surround in the car. In Part 2, we’ll hear from John Kellogg of Dolby Labs, a producer/engineer who’s worked on 5.1 mixes for the likes of Deep Purple, Foreigner, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Until then, think about wrapping yourself around the idea of surround in the car. Better yet, let car surround wrap itself around you.

Back to Surround, Part 2
"People have to hear DVD-Audio in the car to realize how much they're missing."
Illustration by John Ueland

In Part 1, we heard from a few musicians, producers, and engineers who deemed the car to be the ideal environment for DVD-Audio. This time, we’ll hear from a few more. “It’s time for music to outgrow stereo, to outgrow CDs,” proclaims John Kellogg of Dolby Labs, a producer/engineer who’s worked on 5.1-channel mixes for the likes of Deep Purple, Foreigner, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. “DVD-Audio in the car will become as common as DVD players,” he predicts. I concur. Now that companies such as Eclipse, Kenwood, Panasonic, and Pioneer are bringing DVD-Audio-ready head units to market, there’s never been a better time for surround sound to take off in the car.

Seeing that I had raved about the DVD-A version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours in my “Road Gear” column in S&V awhile back after listening to it in a 5.1-equipped SUV, Kellogg put me in touch with Ken Caillat, the 1977 album’s original co-producer, who remixed it for multichannel playback in 2001. (He was in the studio putting the finishing touches on the DVD-A version of the Mac’s 1979 opus, Tusk, for a projected fall release.)

“Hearing DVD-Audio in the car is going to wake people up,” says Caillat, president and CEO of Highway One Productions. “It still amazes me that so many people don’t even know DVD-Audio exists. It’s annoying, in fact. People have to hear it in the car to realize how much they’re missing.”

So what exactly are people missing? “When you mix in stereo, you often have to make the instruments ‘smaller’ in a way,” he explains. “Say I wanted an acoustic guitar to poke through a couple of electric guitars in the front left channel. I have to find the essence of that guitar — which may be at 1.2 kHz — and make it so you can hear it fight its way through those other guitars. With a surround sound mix, I can take that acoustic guitar and put it off by itself over my left shoulder. Now it has its own space, and every instrument gets to sound bigger than before.”

Hearing Rumours in that 5.1-equipped SUV was a revelation. Lindsey Buckingham’s mostly acoustic “Never Going Back Again” is accented during two instrumental breaks by vocal harmonies and Mick Fleetwood’s snare drum — neither element was used in the original mix. And Christine McVie’s “Oh Daddy” displayed more punch by featuring a more prominent John McVie bass line. “That song never really jumped out at me in the stereo version,” admits Caillat. “John was trying to make a whale sound with his bass, so, to get that across, I engineered a delay that went from the front to the rear speakers. In the surround version, you really get a sense of the echo and the bass movement. The bass becomes the foundation for the whole song.”

Recently, I took my stereo Tusk CD out in my Explorer for a listening session, and while I love many of the songs on it — especially the punky edge to “The Ledge” and the urgency of “That’s Enough for Me” — I found the sound a bit flat overall. “One reason,” explains Caillat, “is that a lot of the songs were cleaned up and sanitized from what was originally there. So now I’m going to give the listener some alternative mixes.”

One Tusk track that will benefit from this approach is Stevie Nicks’s “Beautiful Child,” a lesser-known ballad that’s been on the set list for this year’s Mac tour. “There was an electric guitar doing a sustain in the background as a counterpoint to the chord changes that got taken out [of the original mix], and now it’s back,” Caillat reveals. “Also, I’m using the bass probably 10 dB harder than you’d anticipate. It’s so strong now that it builds a foundation that all the high-frequency stuff can sit on top of.”

Caillat got some reinforcement for his work from an interesting source. “I happened to go to one of the band’s dress rehearsals the other night with my daughters,” he says, “and when they played ‘Beautiful Child,’ the bass was way back in the mix. One of my daughters turned around and said to me, ‘Oh, I like your mix better.’ ” That’s the kind of reaction Caillat hopes to get when people experience the Tusk DVD-A in the car. “I want them to hear it like they’re hearing the album for the first time,” he says.

Caillat also wants car companies to take serious notice of the potential of multichannel playback in the car environment. “My 5.1-channel studio gear is portable,” he explains, “so I could hook it all up to a wiring harness in any vehicle. I’d love to take a special demo disc to Detroit and actually mix something like Tusk in the car — literally make the adjustments right there — so they could hear the mix exactly the way it was intended. That would be phenomenal.” Ken, if you need somebody to hook that up for you, you know where to find me.

Prowling for Surround
The $20,000 question is: How do you put a surround system in your car without tearing it apart?
Illustration by Graham Smith

Over the course of my last two articles, I gave you the lowdown on surround sound and DVD-Audio in the car environment. We heard from producers, engineers, and musicians on why the car is an optimal environment for surround music and how they went about preparing 5.1-channel mixes for maximum enjoyment while you’re out on the road.

So let’s say that you’re now down with mobile surround. You’re sold on the idea of listening to the same DVD-A and DTS discs in your vehicle that you do at home. (No Super Audio CDs, though — there aren’t any SACD players for the car yet, and none are expected to become available anytime soon.) The $20,000 question is: How do you put a surround system in your car without tearing it apart? Speaker placement is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to installing any car stereo system, much less a multichannel system.

I was recently talking about the speaker dilemma with Keith Lehmann, vice president and general manager for Ultimate Sound, a car stereo manufacturer located in Pomona, California. “While the placement of stereo left and right speakers is important,” he says, “the placement of dedicated center and surround speakers for multichannel systems is critical. A surround speaker that’s mounted too close to the listener — something that happens a lot in two-seaters — tends to steer the program to the rear of the vehicle, and an ill-placed center speaker can create channel-imbalance and phasing problems. One solution is to reduce the surround channels’ high frequencies and carefully balance the center channel’s level with the left and right speakers so it won’t overwhelm the program.”

Finding the right spot for a center speaker is one of the most difficult challenges installers face. “Few people like the idea of having speaker holes carved into their pristine dashboards,” observes Lehmann. “But the half-DIN-size SRK5 powered speaker array from Clarion seems like a good solution because it can be mounted right above or below an in-dash DVD player with the proper installation kit.” (And the system’s outboard amplifier can be hidden away just about anywhere.) If you’re considering having a center speaker installed in your dashboard, Lehmann suggests that you find a “qualified installer with photo documentation of successful center-speaker installs in a vehicle like yours. You don’t want to become some installer’s ‘center-channel experiment.’”

While I was in Portland, Oregon, on an extended road trip in the summer of ’02, I came across an amazing 5.1 install in, of all things, a 2001 Plymouth Prowler. The vehicle’s owner, Rik Huserik of Gresham, Oregon, had quite a challenge cramming all of that gear into his tight but sleek purple two-seater, but the install crew at Portland’s Car Toys was up to the challenge. The front speakers, two pairs of Phoenix Gold components, were simply put in the factory locations in the dash and doors. The center-channel issue was solved by cleverly placing a Kenwood KSC-900CTR in the top of the dash. Car Toys installer Wayne Ferryman dropped the speaker into the center air vents by way of a special bracket. (The vents stayed functional.) The surrounds, a pair of MB Quart 4-inch coaxials, were fitted into the rear factory locations behind the headrests.

Tunes were delivered by a trio of Kenwood Excelon source components: a Music Keg digital music server mounted vertically on the back of the passenger seat, a DVD receiver in the dash, and a Sirius satellite radio tuner under the driver’s seat. (Huserik even stashed a Sony PlayStation 2 videogame player in the center console.) The system is powered by a pair of Phoenix Gold amps, one 75 W x 4 and the other 100 W x 2.

So how’d the Prowler sound? I got behind the wheel while Huserik cued up a Van Halen DVD, and the cymbal-heavy “Dreams” instantly pummeled me from all sides — but in a good way. As Goldilocks might have said (if she’d been a mobile metalhead, that is), the sound wasn’t too close, wasn’t unbalanced, and wasn’t rear-biased. It was just right.

Huserik doesn’t keep the Prowler to himself. He loves turning people on to the wonders of his system — whether it’s at a tailgate party or a car show. The bottom line: No matter what the vehicle, mobile surround sound is a viable option. Concludes Lehmann, “When the front and rear levels are adjusted to produce a realistic music experience, the effect is nothing short of breathtaking.” I couldn’t agree more.