Home Theater Surround Sound Barrier

Breaking the Home Theater Surround Sound Barrier
By Stephen Carter

Are you upsetting your neighbors with that wireless surround sound system? Why not dial the volume down, kick in a pair of unobtrusive Bass Shakers, and still get the same effect.

Once upon a time, in the good old days when I was a boy, you would head off to the cinema in the weekend with your siblings in tow, allowing your parents a few hours of relief from the highly stressful realities of parenting in the seventies. Or something like that. To be honest, I don't think my parents knew how good they had it back then. We lived at the edge of the world, or as close as you can get to it before falling off the map--in the trouble-free little city of Auckland, New Zealand. Either way, off to the cinema we would go, every weekend. Like dutiful clockwork children of the corn fields, sunshine or rain, good movie or total stinker. Actually, it's a wonder my force-feed diet of Tarzan, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Lee did me no lasting harm. Somehow I survived to adulthood, retaining my childlike indulgence for suspended disbelief in a darkened viewing room, minus the mandatory box of chocolate-centered Jaffas, which I have neither seen nor tasted now for perhaps thirty years.

Now, there's a reason people go to movie theaters, and it's one that likely factors into why I remember that part of my childhood so well. Watching movies in a cinema is nothing like the experience at home. At least, it was not back then. The big screen was essential to "losing yourself" in the fabricated reality of a big studio production. But, contributing just as much to the success of this movie magic was the concept of surround sound--having the aural component of the experience assault you from multiple directions at once. If I was an engineer I'd probably tell you that, by combining the sound from a number of separated speakers in a coordinated way, it is possible to create a spatial imaging component to the movie-going experience that your television just cannot reproduce. In layman's terms: surround sound just pulls you into the screen.

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