5.1 Surround Sound Color Code
Carlos Beirise
In many cards, the microphone connector will be pink, the line out or headphone will be lime green, and the stereo line in will be light blue. Additional jacks may be present on newer soundcards for rear and mid surround speakers.
There is a wildly accepted color standard for computer sound card input and output jacks, but connector colors may vary between different brands. If you think you have a nonstandard card, consult your soundcard's manual or the manufacturer's web site before making any connections.
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Kneeling behind my equipment stand the other day, holding a MagLite in my mouth (wish my receiver had a USB port for a light like the new Axiom subs do!), I was trying to change some of my speaker connections when I noticed that none of the usual red/black color codes for positive and negative terminals for the various channels applied. Instead, there was an array of different colored binding posts, only one of which was red (the positive connector for the right front main speaker). Though my A/V receiver is two years old, I'd forgotten that it has the new Consumer Electronics Association color coding for each speaker channel, intended to help newbies (as well as oldies) identify which channel is which when you are doing the speaker or cable hookup for a 5.1-channel (or more) surround sound system.
A good idea, but you'll need the following color code to identify each channel unless you have your owner's manual handy. If your receiver has been manufactured in the last couple of years, there's a good chance it will conform to the new color scheme. In addition to the speaker binding posts, the RCA preamp outputs, the Subwoofer Output, and the multichannel analog preamp inputs also conform to the same colors.
For speaker binding posts, the negative terminal (-) is always black, whereas the positive terminal (+) will have a different color corresponding to each channel of the surround system. If you find this confusing, note the positive (+) and negative (-) polarity for each pair of binding posts. The new color code is:
Lofft has been writing about hi-fi and video professionally for over 20 years, ever since his first syndicated newspaper column, "Sound Advice", began appearing weekly in The Toronto Star, Canada's largest-circulation daily newspaper. In the late 1970s, he became a contributing editor, columnist, and equipment reviewer at AudioScene Canada, the leading national consumer electronics magazine at the time.
He also wrote on consumer electronics for Maclean's magazine and made occasional appearances on TV on "Canada AM," the national CTV morning show, and on June Callwood's national afternoon TV talk show.
An audio and electronics enthusiast from childhood, Alan began building vacuum-tube hi-fi gear for his father, who was an audiophile in the 1950s. Lofft's passion for audio continued through college, during which time he hosted and produced "On Campus", a radio show taped on location (on a portable Ampex 650 open-reel recorder) at Wilfrid Laurier University and broadcast locally in Kitchener, Ontario.
Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity and depth of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener (surround channels). Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to surround sound, theater sound systems commonly had three screen channels of sound that played from three loudspeakers (left, center, and right) located in front of the audience. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers to the side or behind the listener that are able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction (at ground level) around the listener.
The technique enhances the perception of sound spatialization by exploiting sound localization: a listener's ability to identify the location or origin of a detected sound in direction and distance. This is achieved by using multiple discrete audio channels routed to an array of loudspeakers.[1] Surround sound typically has a listener location (sweet spot) where the audio effects work best and presents a fixed or forward perspective of the sound field to the listener at this location.
Though cinema and soundtracks represent the major uses of surround techniques, its scope of application is broader than that, as surround sound permits creation of an audio-environment for all sorts of purposes. Multichannel audio techniques may be used to reproduce contents as varied as music, speech, natural or synthetic sounds for cinema, television, broadcasting, or computers. In terms of music content for example, a live performance may use multichannel techniques in the context of an open-air concert, of a musical theatre performance or for broadcasting;[3] for a film, specific techniques are adapted to movie theater or to home (e.g. home cinema systems).[4] The narrative space is also a content that can be enhanced through multichannel techniques. This applies mainly to cinema narratives, for example the speech of the characters of a film,[5][6][7] but may also be applied to plays performed in a theatre, to a conference, or to integrate voice-based comments in an archeological site or monument. For example, an exhibition may be enhanced with topical ambient sound of water, birds, train or machine noise. Topical natural sounds may also be used in educational applications.[8] Other fields of application include video game consoles, personal computers and other platforms.[9][10][11][12] In such applications, the content would typically be synthetic noise produced by the computer device in interaction with its user. Significant work has also been done using surround sound for enhanced situation awareness in military and public safety application.[13]
Commercial surround sound media include videocassettes, DVDs, and SDTV broadcasts encoded as analog matrixed Dolby Surround compressed Dolby Digital and DTS, and lossless audio such as DTS HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD on HDTV Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD, which are identical to the studio master. Other commercial formats include the competing DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and Super Audio CD (SACD) formats, and MP3 Surround. Cinema 5.1 surround formats include Dolby Digital and DTS. Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS) is an 8 channel cinema configuration which features 5 independent audio channels across the front with two independent surround channels, and a Low-frequency effects channel. Traditional 7.1 surround speaker configuration introduces two additional rear speakers to the conventional 5.1 arrangement, for a total of four surround channels and three front channels, to create a more 360 sound field.
Most surround sound recordings are created by film production companies or video game producers; however some consumer camcorders have such capability either built-in or available separately. Surround sound technologies can also be used in music to enable new methods of artistic expression. After the failure of quadraphonic audio in the 1970s, multichannel music has slowly been reintroduced since 1999 with the help of SACD and DVD-Audio formats. Some AV receivers, stereophonic systems, and computer sound cards contain integral digital signal processors or digital audio processors to simulate surround sound from a stereophonic source (see fake stereo).
The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for the Disney studio's animated film Fantasia. Walt Disney was inspired by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's operatic piece Flight of the Bumblebee to have a bumblebee featured in his musical Fantasia and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre. The initial multichannel audio application was called 'Fantasound', comprising three audio channels and speakers. The sound was diffused throughout the cinema, controlled by an engineer using some 54 loudspeakers. The surround sound was achieved using the sum and the difference of the phase of the sound. However, this experimental use of surround sound was excluded from the film in later showings. In 1952, "surround sound" successfully reappeared with the film "This is Cinerama", using discrete seven-channel sound, and the race to develop other surround sound methods took off.[16][17]
In the 1950s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented with and produced ground-breaking electronic compositions such as Gesang der Jnglinge and Kontakte, the latter using fully discrete and rotating quadraphonic sounds generated with industrial electronic equipment in Herbert Eimert's studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Edgar Varese's Pome lectronique, created for the Iannis Xenakis-designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, also used spatial audio with 425 loudspeakers used to move sound throughout the pavilion.
In 1957, working with artist Jordan Belson, Henry Jacobs produced Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light - a series of concerts featuring new music, including some of Jacobs' own, and that of Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others - taking place in the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Sound designers commonly regard this as the origin of the (now standard) concept of "surround sound." The program was popular, and Jacobs and Belson were invited to reproduce it at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels.[18]There are also many other composers that created ground-breaking surround sound works in the same time period.
In 1978, a concept devised by Max Bell for Dolby Laboratories called "split surround" was tested with the movie Superman. This led to the 70mm stereo surround release of Apocalypse Now, which became one of the first formal releases in cinemas with three channels in the front and two in the rear.[19] There were typically five speakers behind the screens of 70mm-capable cinemas, but only the Left, Center and Right were used full-frequency, while Center-Left and Center-Right were only used for bass-frequencies (as it is currently common). The Apocalypse Now encoder/decoder was designed by Michael Karagosian, also for Dolby Laboratories. The surround mix was produced by an Oscar-winning crew led by Walter Murch for American Zoetrope. The format was also deployed in 1982 with the stereo surround release of Blade Runner.
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