Stereophile article about 5.1 channel music

[dwight]

Has anyone read the Steve Guttenberg AS WE SEE IT column, on page three from the July issue of STEREOPHILE. It isn’t that we haven’t heard this before, but how can these two paragraphs exist in the same article:

“I love stereo, always have, always will. A great stereo recording can produce such a full bodied three dimensional soundstage that surround sound seems superfluous. Multichannel is just peachy for home theater, but good ol’ stereo suits music just fine, thank you very much.

He also wrote this toward the end referring to Talking Heads:

“…..Jerry Harrison and engineer E.T. Thorngren made masterful 5.1 remixes of the band’s eight studio albums. Check out “Found a Job”, from More Songs About Buildings and Food (Dual Disc, Sire R276450). Listen to the way David Byrne’s and Harrison’s guitars arc from the front to the rear speakers and how the syncopated closing vamp reveals unsuspected complexities lurking deep in the densely layered patterns of guitars, handclaps keyboards, and synths, all within a holographic soundscape. After that, the stereo version sounds pretty ho-hum.

Is this instructive or what?

Dwight

 

[Quadro-Action]

Unfortunately many of the journalists and editors seems to be immobile in themes of music and their mixing. And it is especially annoying, that also some of them mean, that their own antiquated opinion about surround sound is the only one for all listeners in the world. So the listener should not too impressed from their writings. Especially we fans of Quadraphony know, how harmful those arrogant moaners have been in the 70's, which was helping too for the failure of the 4-channel surround sound.
But when one says, that Stereo is for him personally further on wonderful, so it may be acceptable. But for me as fans of surround this is nevertheless antiquated. Then they may also present tests and reports about amplifiers made in 1958 in their magazine from 2009. And especially surprising, when one has two different meanings to the same thing - the sound mixdown. We may have also a statement from him here in the web, which would always wellcome - as Kal Rubinson is writing here too.

Dietrich

 

[ssully]

Gutenberg's a full member of the audiophile journalist club. Subjective impression trumps logic and consistency. He was also for some reason involved in the Chesky surround test disc, which has a screwed-up bass management test track. I asked him about that and he couldn't explain why.

From what I've read Kal Rubinson is the only one at Stereophile that actually 'gets' surround and related technologies. The rest of that sorry crew shouldn't even be allowed to write about technology, they either get it wrong (Harley), or get it technically right but spin it in outrageously misleading ways (like Atkinson on mp3s).

Two channel was demonstrated to be inadequate for realism back in the '20s by Harvey Fletcher and company at Bell Labs. Someday the 'high end' will catch up.