Listening to music in surround sound

[Petrie.]

Heh, wouldn't you know I'd be up for a little more audio experimenting on these evenings off? :  Anyway, I figured I'd see since my soundcard can support 5.1 surround sound, just how it would work.  Having an analog output and some old Sony SRS-A21's lying around I made them my rear speakers and went searching for the appropriate setup for a software player.

TheKMPlayer can natively do 5.1 setups and the output was very good, however, there seems to be some kind of unexplained normalizing going on because the points in scores where the music is meant to grow, it never "grew" so to speak.  I made sure all the normalizers were off, and no volume leveling was present but the issue did not go away (imagine the strong creschendo at the end of LBT's End Credits track just being pretty flat )

Confused, I tried to see if I could find anything appropriate for foobar or winamp.  There was something out there called AndrewLabs ATSurround Processor and there were versions for both Winamp and foobar.  I took the foobar plugin and configured it.  The sound is just as good as the output the KMPlayer gave, only I could configure it even further, and there was no quasi-normalizing going on.  Loud parts in songs still got loud when they were supposed to.    B)  I haven't tried the headphone mode yet, but supposedly its supposed to make it sound like the music is less "in your head" and more on a concert soundstage.

Naturally a plugin like this is more suited to orchestral or chamber music, and less useful for pop.  Depending on the setup and configuration you could lose the lead vocalist but I didn't have an issue.

[action9000]

I'm playing with a copy of Sonar 6, Producer edition, which let me compose and master my music work in any number of channels up to 10.2 surround.  Only problem is, I lack rear speakers to test the surround aspect while composing so I'd really be shooting in the dark.

Surround music certainly has its strong points but I haven't really been exposed to it since I got my studio speakers, which are 2.0 (I can't justify/afford 5 of these bloody things! )

I always prefer native 5.1 audio files over artificial upmixing, but as we both know, Petrie, 5.1 audiophiles...er...audio files are few and far between.

[EDIT]
If anyone is interested, here is a link to an artist who has released some of her work in multichannel .wma as well as .ac3 (Dolby Digital 5.1) surround format.  If you have the right audio setup, it sounds amazing.
http://www.lynnemusic.com/surround.html
[/EDIT]

[landbeforetimelover]

I have surround sound connected to my master computer.  It really sucks.  The sound on my master computer is so good, that if I play anything on any other sound source, it sounds like crap. <_< I bought a $75 sound card and spent countless amounts of money on the system and it sounds great.  You can always upgrade your speaker system, but it hurts when you go back down in quality. -_-

[Petrie.]

Tim I don't know if you installed that plugin, but the headphone settings are pretty good....as it says, the sound no loger literally sounds in your head, but as if its on a soundstage in front of you.  I'm more impressed with this than I am of the speaker setup.

[Petrie.]

I actually had to turn this plugin off, because it affected my computer so that I guess it was always running in the background, even when foobar is no longer running, and it prevented my monitor from turning off, so I didn't sleep well for one night...  -_-  Nasty bugs.