# 5.1 with different sets of speakers



## Jackles (Jul 6, 2015)

Hi all,

I would like to experiment with 5.1. I already have a set of Dynaudio BM5A MK2, but I don't want to spend as much for "experimenting". 
Can I mix my Dynaudio with other "cheaper" speakers (like the M-Audio BX5), or is it like crossing the streams ?


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## FriFlo (Jul 7, 2015)

You should have the same speakers for LCR, it is not so bad, if you have different ones for the surrounds. What is way more important than the speakers (and most people seem to neglect that) is the room! You need a room where you can position yourself and the speakers at the righ distance around you. You need lots of acoustic preparation. This is already important for a mixing studio in stereo, but for surround it is even more important and also more difficult to achieve! I centered my project studio on stereo mixing and added the center and the surrounds as a gimmick. It is more for personal pleasure. Maybe I can improve the surrounds by some additional treatment, but I am realistic and this will never be a 5.1 mixing studio. I can compose some stuff in surround and hand it over to an engineer in stems. This is what you should consider, when thinking about 5.1, unless you have a budget of at least $30.000 (just for building the room, the speakers budget on top) and a room bigger than 30 square meter (and 3 meter ceiling): it will not become a surround mixing studio, however hard you try ...


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## sleepy hollow (Jul 7, 2015)

Jackles said:


> Can I mix my Dynaudio with other "cheaper" speakers


If it's just for 'experimenting', then go for it. Maybe you can borrow additional speakers that are not 'too far away' from your BM5A's, sound-wise I mean. You can use EQ to make the mixed speaker set-up sound as homogeneous as possible.

That should work as long as you're just experimenting with the new format.


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## dgburns (Jul 7, 2015)

Try not to put the surround speakers too far behind you,they should be more like a few feet behind you not all the way at the back wall facing your head.It creates an exagerated surround field.And in some dolby/film setups,the surrounds are turned up 3 db.It makes you feed them a little less.The sub is calibrated at plus 10 db at the source speaker.
Or you could pony up for the waves surround plugin that does bass management,which takes care of the speaker level calibration as you can set the levels for sub and surrounds in the plugin.And it is able to run bass management so you can throw the sub freq that you are fedding the surrounds to come through the subwoofer.Personally,I prefer to rolloff below 100 hz or so to the rears as nothing in the low end gives off direction cues for sound anyways,and it bottlenecks the sub with exess stuff not intended to come out the subwoofer anyway.
One final note,play pink or brown noise through the speakers and try to get the "sound" to be even as you pan across the speakers.You might be surprised to hear some strong differences in the sound as it passes from speaker to speaker,based on room and placement.The ideal is to get the pink,or brown noise to sound exatcly the same as it passes from speaker to speaker.Harder to do than you'd think,but can get your subjective listening field closer to good from just twaeking the placement of the speakers a little at a time to get the sound even.It is especially important to get the three front ones as close as possible,if possible.
The idea about surround in a 5.1 setup is that the sound will track well across the fronts,and will pan fron rear left to right as well.The sticking point is to get the sound to track well panning from front to back,which is very difficult based on the speaker placement and spread.Much research into this from Tomlison Holman.You should google him and get his take on things.I mostly quote him above anyway.
btw,Cubase has a great control room setup where you can place the waves bass management plug and create a nice little listening environment.


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## sin(x) (Jul 7, 2015)

If memory serves correctly, either Tom Holman or some Dolby whitepaper says that if all fullrange speakers cannot be of the same model, using the next smaller model from the same manufacturer for the surrounds is the way to go.


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jul 7, 2015)

There are a lot of big name composers who use cheaper monitors for their surrounds like Junkie XL, Blake Neely, Michael Levine, and Paul Thomson (Spitfire). I've also heard that the center can be different as well since its mostly used for dialogue and not music. Another thing to consider is that Hans Zimmer suggests working in 5.0.


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## charlieclouser (Jul 7, 2015)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> There are a lot of big name composers who use cheaper monitors for their surrounds like Junkie XL, Blake Neely, Michael Levine, and Paul Thomson (Spitfire). I've also heard that the center can be different as well since its mostly used for dialogue and not music. Another thing to consider is that Hans Zimmer suggests working in 5.0.



Yes, and JXL is working in quad - so no sub / Lfe channel, no center. This is much easier to deal with for many reasons - no need to use a send to Lfe channels, no need for true L-C-R panning; just "front pair" and "back pair". This is basically what I've been doing for many years and it gives you most of the yumminess of surround without the additional hassles of L-C-R panning (difficult in Logic) and Lfe sends. If you are delivering plenty of stems, then the mixers on the stage can route some stems to the center and Lfe if needed - like if you have a solo cello that wants to be in the center, or if a big sub kick drum needs to hit the Lfe subs, then if you have enough separation of those elements on different stems it's not a big deal for the score mixer or mixers on the dub stage to direct those elements to the appropriate destination, even from quad (or stereo) source stems. If you're delivering not very many stems this can be more difficult, like if all the drums were together on one stem it would probably not be ideal to just send the whole drum stem to the Lfe channel, but that is project-dependent. On most of my scores I only used the Lfe channels for electronic kick drums and synth bass, and in most cases these were not even used on the dub stage except in a couple of occasions.

I've never put music in my center channels, even though this is technically incorrect and may cause a loss of imaging due to the "phantom center" instead of a truly discrete center channel, the mixers on the dub stage have never said it's a problem and have always been secretly happy that I left the center empty as then it's all theirs to fill up with dialog and sfx. Then again, I'm not providing real orchestral recordings captured with a legitimate 5.1 mic setup, so I'm not throwing away any useful data.

One thing that's IS nice about having a "proper" 5.1 setup is if you are listening / viewing other films on your system to compare to your mixes. One of my favorites is the movie U-571, which has great sound design and use of surround and Lfe - it sounds brilliant on a proper 5.1 rig in my room... the subs really hit hard when the depth charges go off!


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## Coldsound (Jul 31, 2015)

Hi Jackles,
Did you find a solution ? 
I also have the Dynaudio BM5A MK2, and I'm looking to make 4.0 setup in a relativly small room.
I went to test different speaker today, and I might go for the Neumann KH120, which is kind of expensive for surround speaker, but sound really good especially mid and low and are not tiring...
Anybody has some other choices to have nice low end, which I find, are important for the backspeaker. (and I don't want to go for a sub for now, because of the neighbors, and the setup is more complicated to handle)


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## Jackles (Aug 7, 2015)

Coldsound said:


> Hi Jackles,
> Did you find a solution ?
> I also have the Dynaudio BM5A MK2, and I'm looking to make 4.0 setup in a relativly small room.
> I went to test different speaker today, and I might go for the Neumann KH120, which is kind of expensive for surround speaker, but sound really good especially mid and low and are not tiring...
> Anybody has some other choices to have nice low end, which I find, are important for the backspeaker. (and I don't want to go for a sub for now, because of the neighbors, and the setup is more complicated to handle)



I did what I said in my first post.
Some people I know (that work as mixer) told me that the most important thing was that the LCR speakers (center being the most important in (talking) cinema) were the same, and as good as possible. I thus bought a third Dynaudio, and completed the set with the M-Audio BX5.

Afterward, I read in some 5.1 documentation that the main speakers (LCR and LsRs) should be the same.
Even though I do have a small, untreated room, at the calibration step, I really felt that the gap between the Dynaudio and the M-Audio was too big.
I wouldn't necessary buy a full set of Dynaudio (unless you have the bucks), but don't go too cheap either.

Concerning the sub, I understood (or I think I did...) that, unless you deal with bass managment, you have some latitude. The LFE channel is there for effect only, and is (IMHO) not as demanding in terms of quality, placement and calibration, as the main speakers (LCRLsRs). But I'm not sure about this, so...

My conclusion would be that, the most important thing, after all, is speaker placement.
All speakers should be on a circle, around the mixing position, at ear height if possible. Anyway, they have to be facing you (stick a little mirror on every speakers, if you see your face everytime, the orientation is correct, very handy).
Those rules might not be as important as it seems, but it happens to be common ground rules, I suppose you can adapt from there.

http://abluesky.com/support/blue-sky-calibration-test-files/ (Calibration instructions by Blue Sky)


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## AR (Aug 7, 2015)

You can use different speakers for the surrounds. Levelling takes some adjustments and time. For the Center speaker I use the same manufacturer as my L-R. Also as stated above you need a treated room.


charlieclouser said:


> Yes, and JXL is working in quad - so no sub / Lfe channel, no center. This is much easier to deal with for many reasons - no need to use a send to Lfe channels, no need for true L-C-R panning; just "front pair" and "back pair". This is basically what I've been doing for many years and it gives you most of the yumminess of surround without the additional hassles of L-C-R panning (difficult in Logic) and Lfe sends. If you are delivering plenty of stems, then the mixers on the stage can route some stems to the center and Lfe if needed - like if you have a solo cello that wants to be in the center, or if a big sub kick drum needs to hit the Lfe subs, then if you have enough separation of those elements on different stems it's not a big deal for the score mixer or mixers on the dub stage to direct those elements to the appropriate destination, even from quad (or stereo) source stems. If you're delivering not very many stems this can be more difficult, like if all the drums were together on one stem it would probably not be ideal to just send the whole drum stem to the Lfe channel, but that is project-dependent. On most of my scores I only used the Lfe channels for electronic kick drums and synth bass, and in most cases these were not even used on the dub stage except in a couple of occasions.


I don't use my center speaker (mostly for music). But I have one for the film dialog. Nothing bothers me more to fight against huge amount of SoundFX and slightly rolled of dialog in action scenes. I compose my music around those two aspects. If I'm having big explosions (lot's of rumble in the LFE and L-C-R) I use higher string sections to compensate the full mix. Same goes for LFE channel.

I wonder if some of you guys ever used the Waves plugin called "5.1 Manager"? That's such a powerful tool to stereo widen your tracks or letting your sound go in circles. Very powerful. I recommend it every 5.1 guru here to check it out.


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