[QLab] Surround Effects

[Steven Devino]

David I will reply here as well:
Hi David,
I use an almost identical setup to the one you propose for many many  
shows per year with great efficiency.
Unless I am misunderstanding your intent, I think you may have a  
slight misperception about what the approach of these mixers is.

First of all the surround capability of these mixers is designed for  
the recording studio and mainly focusses on panning and bussing  
assignments. So this is more for the convenience of a recoding  
engineer and not all that suited to live theatre.

Secondly I think that theatre surround is more a matter of 6 (or 4 or  
8 or 20 or whatever) number of discreet outputs with sounds sent by  
the designer as needed.   I use QLAB via a MHLABs MIO 2882 to send 8  
channels from the computer to the DM1000 via ADAT.

I assign each of the ADAT inputs to whatever outputs I need for the  
show. For something close to your setup I would use Front Left, Front  
Right, Rear Left, Rear Right, and Stage. The stage speaker is  
directly overhead at about center stage and provides a convenient  
channel for effects which need to sound like they are coming from the  
stage. This speaker is usually pointed straight down at the stage.

Then I assign and route as follows:
1. QLAB ch1 - Front left  to stereo panned left on the DM1k
2. QLAB ch2 - Front right to stereo panned right on the DM1k
3. QLAB ch3 - assigned to bus 3 routed out of omni out 3 to the Left  
Rear amp/speaker
4. QLAB ch4 - assigned to bus 4 routed out of omni out 4 to the Right  
Rear amp/speaker
5. QLAB ch5 - assigned to Aux5 routed to omni out 5 to the stage  
speaker.

QLAB channels 6-8 are used for specials etc.

I use an aux out for the stage speaker because I use the same speaker  
to put orchestra on the stage for the actors. If you never do  
musicals you could just use a bus to make it simpler.

The subwoofers get fed via aux 8. I just assign some of each QLAB  
channel to the aux 8 and put the appropriate high pass filter on the  
Aux8 output.

With this setup if I can put sounds where I want them. Like trains or  
planes or baseballs in flight traveling past the audience from behind  
while crowd noises occur from in front  (or vica versa).

To create ethereal reverbs etc you can route any of the Yamaha reverb  
returns to any or all of the speakers and you can change this routing  
scene by scene by storing the patches along with the scenes.  And  
there are some surround effects available in the DM1000 library.

Surround on the movies and TV is the result of a recording engineer  
placing specific sounds in specific speakers. The 2 channel encoding  
process is simply a convenient way to store 6 separate channels of  
information into 2 data streams. The surround decoder does not  
"synthesize" the surround content. Adding surround effects on your  
receiver is a marketing gimmick for consumers who like to play around  
with stuff like that. But none of the synthesized effect was ever  
intended by the surround sound designer.

I hope this helps.

Steve



Steve Devino
Owner/Tracking/Mixing Engineer
Granite Rocks Recording Studios
603-432-3208p/ 603-421-2538 fax
iChat/AIM:  grocks22 at mac.com
skype: sdevino