I got a good laugh the other night while my fiancee and I were watching a movie (can't remember which one it was?). During one scene it sounded like there was water pouring out of our fireplace. Amy sprang to her feet to see what had happened.
Laughing I told her, 'relax sweetheart, that's just the surround sound effects from the movie". I rewound the scene and played it again.
"But how do they make the sound come from somewhere where there isn't even a speaker"? She asked.
My M80's are up by the screen, and my QS8's hang on the back wall and to the side of us. I haven't upgraded to 7.1 yet, and there are no surround speakers on the side walls at all. But the sound was coming right out of the fireplace on the left hand side of the room.
Her question sort of stumped me. I mean I know that surround sound is designed to fool the mind into thinking it's coming from all sorts of directions, not just out of the speakers. But how they accomplish this is beyond my comprehension.
"They mix the sounds between the front speaker and rear speaker to make it sound like it's coming from the side", is all I could tell her. She didn't really grasp how they were able to pull it off so convincingly. But then again, I'm not sure how they do it either!
I would imagine it was similar way back when they first developed records and you put that little disk on a player, and the sounds of peoples voices and instruments and everything else played out of the speaker... How do they do that? I still can't even grasp that concept myself. But how its gone from that to being able to project sounds coming from places that don't even have a speaker in the vacinity is truely mind boggling.
We certainly have come a long, long way in a relatively short amount of time.
