Click here to purchase the entire book in PDF format. Soundfield continuity If you watch a movie mixed by a bad re-recording engineer (the film world's equivalent of a mixing engineer in the music world), you'll notice a couple of obvious things. All of the dialog and foley (all of the little extra sound effects like zipping zippers, stepping foot steps and shutting doors) comes from the Centre speaker, the music comes from the Left and Right speakers, and the Surround speakers are used for the occasional special effect like rain sounds or crowd noises. Essentially, you're presented with three completely unrelated soundfields. You can barely get away with this independence of signal in a movie because people are busy using their eyes watching beautiful people in car chases. In music-only recordings, however, we don't have the luxury of this distraction, unfortunately. Listen to a poorly-recorded or mixed surround recording and you'll notice a couple of obvious, but common, mistakes. There is no connection between the front and surround speakers - instruments in the front, reverb in the surround is a common presentation that comes from the film world. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have a presentation where the instruments are in the front only - if that's what you want, that's up to you. What I'm saying is, if you're going for that spatial representation, it's a bad idea to use your surrounds as the only reverb in the mix. They'll sound completely disconnected with your instruments. You can correct this by making some of the signals in the front and the rear the same - either send instruments to the rear or send reverb to the front. What you do is up to you, but please be careful to not have a large wall between your front and your rear. This is the surround equivalent of some of the early days of stereo where the lead vocals were on the left and the guitar on the right. (Not that I don't like the Beatles, but their early stereo recordings weren't exactly sophisticated, spatially speaking...)