So you're saying you can put an individual voice, instrument or sound anywhere you want in the back of the room with a MONO rear speaker channel? That's amazing as usually with mono, the sound can only come from one speaker (with Pro Logic, that normally means a general sound all around you). You cannot put a saxophone halfway to the left behind you.
I did it using the original Dynaco Diamond. And my method carries over to QS, EV, DQ, DS, PL, and PL-II.
You are forgetting that these are all a common matrix system. The locations of the sound images do not depend on the locations of the speakers.
If I encode for QS LB, it comes from the LB no matter which of these systems is playing it. The other speakers combine with the surrounds to provide the image. There does not have to be a speaker where the image is located.
It sounds like you have a software problem. You can pan between any stereo pair. You're misusing the word discrete as well. The channels are discrete. The sounds don't have to be. You can pan between them or increase the sound to be in more than two (The Atmos renderer makes this easy to do by adjusting the object's size as well as location).
Software? I am using a mixer and two analog multitracks. When I pan to a 4-track discrete tape, a pan between LF and LB does NOT sound like it comes between the speakers unless you turn your head to the left. I have to add a small delay to these and feed them to RF and RB to make it sound like it comes from between the LF and LB when I face forward. But now it is encoded.
Sounds should not jump in lumps between channels. In Atmos, it only does that if you use "snap to speaker" for an object. Otherwise, it pans smoothly between channels as it moves in any direction. If you increase the object size, it can be in more speakers, up to all of them at once. You can do this in 5.1 or 7.1 as well with traditional controls. It's just more work.
Unless you are doing something other than a standard amplitude pan, you have to be facing the two speakers (or directly away from them) to hear the sound pan smoothly between them. If you pan smoothly between two speakers that are both on one side of you, you hear the sound suddenly jump from one to the other.
You keep telling me you magically get "holographic" sound with a MONO surround channel with Pro Logic and I'm finding that rather difficult to believe. It's like saying you can pan a sound around the room with one speaker. It just doesn't work. Now using the front channels panning to a mono channel is actually 3-channels. You'll get some in-between, but you still can't image precisely behind you (put a voice directly behind me and move it 5 inches to the left still behind me). That is why they went to 5.1 and why Quad in the '70s used four speakers, not three.
I am panning smoothly around the room with 4 speakers, not just one. The other three speakers work with the back speaker to produce the image. And it works a little better with two surround speakers.
@MidiMagic
Hi Midi, I have 8 speakers arranged like your picture, but currently only using 4 at one time. Is there a way to connect the additional 4(L,R,F,B) speakers using additional decoders/amps instead of a circuit like UQ-8A when playing SQ rotation tone?
The UQ-8A is designed for RM play.
For SQ:
- You can use a resistor mixing matrix (two 10K resistors) to produce a front center channel (F) from the LF and RF. My system lets me produce it from the original L and R or from the SQ LF and RF.
- You can also use a resistor mixing matrix (two 10K resistors) to produce a back center channel (B) from the SQ LB and RB. My system lets me produce it from LB and RB of from -L and +R.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to get the straight left or straight right SQ.
I have used the following for left and right wing speakers with SQ:
- SQ LF and RF
- SQ LB and RB
- RM LB and RB
- DS S channel
- OFF
I usually use a lower level with these.
You could use the UQ-8A for just the added speakers. It should work without the corner speakers.