Surround Sound is For the Birds

Quote of the day:
“The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.”
--Foster's Law

There’s such a fuss these days about surround sound. These audio systems are flying out of Best Buy almost as fast as flat-panel TVs.

I can understand that gamers want sound coming at them from all directions. It heightens the excitement of destroying your opponents, and surround sound puts you in the middle of the action.

Also, I know a lot of folks are blissed out with five or more channels of audio coming at them while watching TV. But the logic of this escapes me.

When you watch TV, you watch a 2-dimensional image that is in front of you. There is no action happening to your sides or behind you. Why do you need sound there?

Seven or eight years ago I was watching “The Sopranos” with a five-channel Dolby Digital setup. I’ll never forget the moment about halfway through when the sound of a door closing came from behind me, to the left. Was AJ coming into our TV room to watch with us? It made no sense.

Shortly after that, I chucked surround sound and opted for stereo.

A case can be made for the ability of a properly set up five-channel system to bring the soundstage out into the room a little, to give it dimension. But because it is very difficult and expensive to correctly set up a system, most are not correctly set up. And much surround-sound source material is still poorly produced.

A much stronger case can be made for investing your money in a better-quality 2-channel setup. Quality over quantity. Stereo is much simpler and fairy easy to set up. And TV audio is surprisingly good, and continues to get better.

You can count on a higher-quality 2-channel sound system to improve things. This is not the case for surround sound or simulated surround sound. It may provide interesting effects, but it does not always improve things.

This is all about entertainment, of course. So if you enjoy having the chainsaw murderer in the room with you (probably coming at you from behind), have fun with surround sound. As for me, I prefer to keep him on the screen.

One more thing. Please don’t claim that five channels sound better or more realistic than stereo. It’s just not so. Sorry.