Now Playing... Dire Straits Brothers in Arms 20th Anniversary Remaster

[K Frame]

"I need to get that CD."

Be sure to go to the Tower records on Route 7 in Vienna, Virginia.

You'll be amazed that there is absolutely no evidence of anything even remotely resembling an automobile within a 5 mile radius...

[Gewehr98]

That makes me bring up a somewhat related question, Bogie...

And Knopfler did the 5.1 mix for the DVD-A side of the disk...

I finally dug my older Yamaha DSP-1 and Natural Sound M35 4-channel power amp out of the boxes and added 4 more channels to my JoLida 502A/ESS AMT-1B front end last week.

I was watching the re-released Monty Python's Holy Grail DVD, and listening to it in Dolby Surround run through the Yamaha and two amplifiers. (The DSP-1 is too old for Dolby Digital 5.1)  Then we watched Pink Floyd's The Wall on VHS, again through the surround system.  Too much fun.  When I stopped the tape, the RCA patch box automatically makes the digital cable tuner feed the primary, so whatever was on that channel again came through in surround.

But what freaked me out was when I took my iPod, plugged it into the RCA autopatcher, and whichever MP3 songs I had loaded into it also delivered discrete Dolby surround!  WTF? 

I had never considered that record labels would also include Dolby surround tracks on music releases!  Granted, my Buffalo Springfield, Guess Who, and Led Zeppelin selections don't have surround data, but I was really surprised to see the majority of what I had in MP3 selections did!  So I then took a stack of my commercial music CDs and began playing them through the surround system.  Aargh!  Now I have to re-listen to my entire music collection and discover what I hadn't been hearing by listening to the minimalistic front two channels. 

So now I have to figure out when music releases started adding the extra data.  I figure around the debut of the first iteration of Dolby analog surround, about 1982, right?   

And I will be buying that re-release of Brothers in Arms, you damn betcha!

[Bogie]

Either that, or the processor synthesizes it... A lot like the old "Carver Sonic Holography" dealie did back in the early eighties (had a friend with one...).
 

[Gewehr98]

No, it's real Dolby surround. The Yamaha DSP-1 does synthesize a 6-channel soundstage to whichever ambience you're looking for, but only if you tell it to in the non-Dolby modes.  If you set the machine for Dolby Surround, the only parameter you have is the delay to the back channels, which I have set at the factory 20 milliseconds.  If there's no Dolby data when set for that mode, the back channels are dead quiet - Which is what I expected listening to music CDs before I was surprised. Hence my digging through stacks of CDs and vinyl listening for Dolby tracks I never knew were there. 

I remember the Carver Sonic Holograph and Magnetic Field Power Amps.  Pretty damned expensive piece of rig, there.