First Experiments with Surround Recording

In recent weeks I have created several "rehearsal" versions of the 3rd movement of Gustav Mahler's First Symphony. The instrumental range exceeded some of the Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 instruments, so I had to add a few tracks of standard Cakewalk TTS synths for extremely low notes.

I began to experiment with surround recording: assigning instrumental audio tracks to a location within the 5.1 SMPTE setting setup. Since the original mix had stereo tracks in which the reverb was created by the synthesizer, I placed these tracks in stereo into the 5.1 continuum, largely leaving the left-right balance intact. In the future I may revert to mono tracks for each instrument, without synth reverb, then place them in the 5.1 space, and adding a consistent reverb at the end.

For now I have the following files here for comparison (do not click for playing, but rather "right-click and save as", because the files are quite large):

regularstereo recording, 90% quality, variable bit rate, 8.6 MB

same stereo recording, lossless quality, variable bit rate, 33.6MB

5.1 surround recording, 90% quality, variable bit rate, 10.3MB


For now I only can encode multichannel recordings in the Windows Media Player 10 format, hence the WMA extension. The multichannel play will probably only work in Windows Media Player; I tried to play a 5.1 file in WinAmp, but only the front left and right channels were playing.