Short Streaming Penteo separation demo - no burning required

[penteosurround]

I've been meaning to do something like this but just got the time. It's an example of our 3-point and 5-point methods. The 5-point method is new; this is its first time being presented.

This presentation is stereo, but it even works in mono.

You have your choice of wma: http://www.penteosurround.com/demo/Presentation.wma or mp4: http://www.penteosurround.com/demo/Presentation.mp4. The mp4 even streams on an iPhone.

All recorded music is copyrighted and the short snippets presented here are for audio demonstration only under Fair Use.

-John

 

[winopener]

WMA doesn't stream. A downloadable version?

 

[LB-V]

Nice demo and I even learned something. I did not know there were 5 positions in stereo....

Your technology is exciting. Thanks for sharing.

(The WMA did stream for me)

 

[winopener]

the mp4 worked for me, quite nice. The "love shack" 5-split is quite intresting, it does put the ambience in the rears and split nicely the three fronts. I know that said in this way it does sounds like the "stunning surround experience" [(C) Silverline] however it is meant to be a compliment.
A "side" (pun intened) application of the Penteo processing: since the processed L C R (discarting SL and SR) are quite dry the Penteo could be useful also to "dry up" recordings done in very echoeing ambients, thus recovering a better original source.

 

[penteosurround]

A "side" (pun intened) application of the Penteo processing: since the processed L C R (discarting SL and SR) are quite dry the Penteo could be useful also to "dry up" recordings done in very echoeing ambients, thus recovering a better original source.

In most cases, all Penteo does is bring out additional tracks that have been panned hard left/hard right.

You probably know that the "ambience" is not ambience; it's digital echo (probably Lexicon, it was the 80s!) that was added to the "crowd party" and specifically placed there at mix time. It's only there because the mixer intentionally set up echo parameters and then put it there. Essentially everything in modern (since 1960) mixes of pop music is completely dry; it's close-miked in an echo-less studio, often recorded all by itself with the performer listening to headphones.

All "ambience" on modern recordings (again, since 1960 or so) is either echo chamber, plate echo, miked room ambience, or digital echo. Someone has to go out of their way to put it there, and it often got placed in the extreme left and extreme right, with any common waveforms coming back at random angles. A lot of classic rock was recorded with mikes intentionally in the far end of the studio to get some real "room ambience", but that was recorded on a separate track and then mixed in intentionally, and placed specifically where the mixer wanted it to go. Most modern music since the '70s (that wasn't today's completely synthetic recordings of the '90s and '00s) was recorded with a drummer in a separate room, completely dead and isolated from the rest of the band to prevent the loud drums from leaking into the other instrument mikes.

For a couple decades, the most popular "ambience" was a large 8-foot by 4-foot metal plate hanging inside a box that had a speaker driver working as a piston to vibrate the center of the plate with guitar pickups mounted out at the edges. You know how you can make a thunder sound by vibrating a big piece of sheet metal? Imagine that with a speaker and pickup attached. See http://www.sageelectronics.com/bovasound/emt.html. Again, the return from the plate was usually placed out at the left and right extremes, with very little actually coming back to the center.

You can actually get a much more coherent echo with a lot more true overlap from an actual echo chamber (a small hard walled room with a good speaker and microphone inside). There are still four real echo chambers under the parking lot at the Capitol tower in Hollywood. You can rent them separately for use on your own material via ISDN tie-lines from anywhere in the country; the technique we pioneered when I was with EDnet. See http://www.capitolstudios.com/index.cfm?page=chambers

 

[penteosurround]

I did not know there were 5 positions in stereo....
(The WMA did stream for me)

There are an infinite number of positions in stereo, from hard left to hard right, and all percentages in-between. You have to have headphones on to really hear them, or else position yourself in a sweet spot exactly between the speakers.

On this demo, I'm only separating out five. Most mixers, however, don't bother with more than five, since even on headphones, that's hard for your brain to resolve.

 

[arnold_layne]

I'm impressed. I'm not a professional sound engineer by any stretch of the imagination so forgive my ignorance with the following question:

How would the Penteo perform with Q Sound mastered stereo recordings such as the truly wonderful Amused To Death album by Roger Waters?

 

[ssully]

There are lots of upmixing algorithms out there -- Dolby Pro Logic II being the most famous -- so how does this differ?

 

[penteosurround]

There are lots of upmixing algorithms out there -- Dolby Pro Logic II being the most famous -- so how does this differ?

Love that question. At Penteo we've developed a professional-grade pure stereo panorama splitter. It doesn't change anything, it simply separates out the sounds into the speaker positions that the original stereo mixer determined -- based on how far away from center the mixer placed the original sound. Nothing more, nothing less. If the original mixer placed something at the extreme left or right (with a pan pot), it will be extreme left or right (toward the rear). Everything else falls into place based on its position as measured distance from the center. Plus, the center is determined and ferreted out as a separate channel itself.

Competitors' technologies are difficult to listen to one speaker at a time because (especially with some systems) you will hear pumping and wobbling as well as no where near the same degree of separation that Penteo provides. Also, many add delays, EQ, and other effects, and we don't do any of that.

And, after processing, just as stereo adds back down to mono, Penteo adds back down to the original stereo with absolutely NO processing artifacts.

A Penteo song, film, or TV show, when listened to on a stereo system, will be the original stereo mix precisely, but 5.1 listeners can hear the instruments and singers -- that the original mixer positioned out toward the edges -- placed back toward the rears. You can hear them so well, that if you're a musician, you'll hear licks and musical "pirouettes and flourishes" that have always been buried in the mix. No other process has done this so simply or so cleanly.

Our biggest fans so far are musicians, producers, and film mixers, and we're very proud of that.

 

[ndiamone]

Which just means that as the saying goes, that and 35 cents will get you coffee from the cafeteria.
Just like old Chace Productions' Video-fake-ic Stereo, Plangenet Process and Turner Colorization, the public will neither notice nor care.
You can also bet your bippy some kid is gonna leak the code and/or hardware schematics to the Net one day and then pfftttt. All gone.
Look at NoNoise or any of the other multimillion dollar processes from years ago that were once propreitary.
Now you can do better than that at home by yourself in Adobe Audition, Sound Forge or Diamond Cut Pro, and then you can Torrent the program and the software key in a matter of minutes. Such is life with kids (shrug).

 

[ssully]

Love that question. At Penteo we've developed a professional-grade pure stereo panorama splitter. It doesn't change anything, it simply separates out the sounds into the speaker positions that the original stereo mixer determined -- based on how far away from center the mixer placed the original sound. Nothing more, nothing less. If the original mixer placed something at the extreme left or right (with a pan pot), it will be extreme left or right (toward the rear). Everything else falls into place based on its position as measured distance from the center. Plus, the center is determined and ferreted out as a separate channel itself.

Competitors' technologies are difficult to listen to one speaker at a time because (especially with some systems) you will hear pumping and wobbling as well as no where near the same degree of separation that Penteo provides. Also, many add delays, EQ, and other effects, and we don't do any of that.

And, after processing, just as stereo adds back down to mono, Penteo adds back down to the original stereo with absolutely NO processing artifacts.

It's rarely intended that consumers should be listening to systems 'one speaker at a time', and the artifacts you mention tend to get psychoacoustically masked by the presence of other channels.

And I can get startlingly 'discrete' surround effects from DPLII, depending on input, and user settings of Panorama, Dimension, Center Width.

The original 'stereo mix' is of course always still available for audition, simply by deactivating DPLII.

Still, there's nothing wrong with offering new surround-from-2ch schemes, and I'm always curious to hear them Thanks for explaining yours to me.

 

[penteosurround]

Still, there's nothing wrong with offering new surround-from-2ch schemes, and I'm always curious to hear them Thanks for explaining yours to me.

Well, there have been a lot of consumer algorithms, but the professional audio industry has never had a process like ours that purely uses the original mixer's own work to determine the 5.1 mix. If you go out and buy the BluRay of "Watchmen", you'll hear our work on 6 songs. Next month, when Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" comes out, you'll hear it on 12 songs. As I said, our biggest fans are film mixers, who are the pickiest listeners around. In the IB case, Quentin himself approved our work. Interestingly, some of the pieces in the film actually come from Quentin's own vinyl record collection. We didn't touch a pop or tick, but we Penteo processed it into 5.1!

We're also now proud to have some people on our administrative staff who have some fairly legendary credentials. Check out our "about" page on the website.

We've also just signed a deal to license Penteo for television broadcast audio processors. Soon you'll start to see less and less 2.0 digital broadcasts that you have to upconvert yourself.

But more than anything, we're about the MUSIC, and the mix integrity and stability. While we do want to get our alogrithm in as many useful places as possible, starting at the professional side of things, it would be no fun at all without listening to the thousands of buried performances on the stereo mixes we all grew up with.

And thanks for all your responses!

-John

 

[penteosurround]

It's rarely intended that consumers should be listening to systems 'one speaker at a time'.

Our customers (mixers) listen to one speaker at a time constantly. That's why we have to have such clean processing, and what really differentiates Penteo from any process that has ever come before. We're very proud of each channel being so unique and clean that you can listen to just one speaker at a time, and hear unique performances that have always been buried. We encourage it!

 

[Brett]

Very nice demo. While it splits the stereo presentation into 5 channels is the new surround presentation more of a music coming at you from all sides (HEADS UP Motto) or more of an arched presentation with the performers making an arch in front of the listening position? I definitely prefer the HEADS UP way of music coming at you from all sides. It would be nice to hear some of the Rolling Stones SACD material coming at you from all sides.

 

[penteosurround]

Very nice demo. While it splits the stereo presentation into 5 channels is the new surround presentation more of a music coming at you from all sides (HEADS UP Motto) or more of an arched presentation with the performers making an arch in front of the listening position? I definitely prefer the HEADS UP way of music coming at you from all sides. It would be nice to hear some of the Rolling Stones SACD material coming at you from all sides.

Well it's very easy to Penteo-imagine, by just using headphones. Anything that is only in your left ear will be coming from the left and slightly to the rear. If you listen to only the left rear speaker, you will only hear that musical part, with everything else cleanly removed.

Back on headphones, if you're hearing something coming from behind your left cheekbone, it will come from the left front in Penteo. On headphones, anything from directly behind your nose (the center) will be in the center speaker. Again, you can turn off everything but the center speaker, and you will cleanly hear the lead singer, bass, etc., that is behind your nose. You will hear that and nothing else, with the exception of any sounds that might have leaked into the singer's microphone.

The mirror is true for the right: Right ear = Right Rear; Right Cheekbone = Right Front.

And of course there's no way that the same sound can appear in both the left rear and right rear simultaneously, since they are the extremes of the panorama, unless they have been recorded out-of-phase.

We're re-mapping a stereo field into a 5.0 field, and managing bass with the .1. No filters, delays, or EQ, or other superfluousness.

-John

 

[OldAsMono]

Very discrete dissecting done here, nice. I understand how in the professional environment you would 'select' the instruments/voice/sounds/etc. as appropriate and place those logically in a new surround arrangement based on each specific song. In the consumer model it would seem we would have to accept a pre-configured slice and dice of the stereo placement. Are you working on a somehow more intelligent device that separates each instrument/voice for placement in surround? Existing consumer algorithms 'try' to focus on moving specific sounds to the rears/center. Do you envision a future consumer Penteo to do the same but of course much more discretely?

 

[Wunlow]

And of course there's no way that the same sound can appear in both the left rear and right rear simultaneously, since they are the extremes of the panorama, unless they have been recorded out-of-phase.

John,

Have you ever considered a 6.1 version of Pento, where out of phase information is sent to the center back channel(s)? Besides the quad junkies, I'm sure the Film guys would eat it up as well!

-Greg-

 

[penteosurround]

In the consumer model it would seem we would have to accept a pre-configured slice and dice of the stereo placement. Do you envision a future consumer Penteo to do the same but of course much more discretely?

It's not a "pre-configured slice-and-dice", it's the original stereo mix, just as you would hear it on headphones. Penteo is not an effect; it's a "panning decoder" of the original stereo mix based on the original stereo placement vectors.

Take a look at http://www.wikirecording.org/How_to_Approach_Panning. It will give some helpful notes as to how a stereo mixer approaches panning. We simply take those panning instructions and move them out to their corresponding locations in a 5.1 field, effectively giving every mixer since the 1960's the ability to have been working in a 5-point field, and in the process, stabilizing the master tape to be as stable as if it had been mixed to a digital master recorder.

All of us at Penteo come from the professional recording and mixing community. Having worked around mixers all my life (and being an Emmy wining mixer myself), I know that stereo panorama placements are selected at mix time very specifically. On mixes since the late 1960's (the common use of pan pots), a mixer would only place something hard left or hard right if they wanted it to be accented: to "stick out". Penteo simply "decodes" that intention, placing it at our extreme, which would be the corresponding rear channel. This is exactly what a new 5.1 re-mixer would have done if they were trying to remain faithful to the original stereo.

We don't intentionally want to change anything to impose any creativeness of our own on the original mixer's vision; effectively we're just turning each pan pot into a joystick, with the point of the pan pot corresponding directly with the sound's vector location within a 5-point field.

Penteo is nothing "fake", it's the original stereo mix, transported to 5.1. Sometimes it's tasteful, sometimes it's not, but however it turns out, that was the intent of the original stereo mixer. We're simply decoding -- and in some cases pointing out -- their original intentions.

 

[penteosurround]

John,

Have you ever considered a 6.1 version of Pento, where out of phase information is sent to the center back channel(s)? Besides the quad junkies, I'm sure the Film guys would eat it up as well!

-Greg-

Hey Greg,

Because the original mix (in stereo) cannot contain "rear center" information, we don't. We don't in any way want to be an "effect"; we're simply taking the original mixer's stereo vision out to a 5-point field.

 

[jsrstereo]

Penteo is nothing "fake", it's the original stereo mix, transported to 5.1. Sometimes it's tasteful, sometimes it's not, but however it turns out, that was the intent of the original stereo mixer. We're simply decoding -- and in some cases pointing out -- their original intentions.

John:

Is it correct to say, then, that an early 60's mix where the vocals are all in one channel and all the instruments are in the other (essentially dual-mono; we can all think of plenty of examples) is not really "Penteo-able"?