Click here to purchase the entire book in PDF format. Common pitfalls Of course, every silver cloud has a dark lining... Recording in surround doesn't automatically fix all of your problems and make you a great recording engineer. In fact, if you're a bad engineer in 2-channel stereo, you'll be 2.5 times worse in 5-channel (2.55 times worse in 5.1) so be careful. I would also go so far as to create an equation which I, in a pathetic stab at immortality, will dub Martin's Law which states that the difficulty of doing a recording and mix in surround sound can be calculated from the number of channels in your media, using Equation 10.45. $$D_{ris} = \left ( \frac{n}{ref} \right)^{n}$$ (11.45) where $D_{ris}$ is the Difficulty of Recording in Surround, $n$ is the number of channels in your recording and $ref$ is the number of channels in the media to which you're comparing. For example, you can calculate that it is 118.4 times more difficult to record in 5.1 than in 2-channel stereo.