Keep your coked-up presets off my stereo

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      Last week, I talked about how a friend's surround-sound system would stubbornly and persistently revert to stereo playback, leaving three-fifths of the speakers with nothing to do. Turns out the core problem was with the programming that the installer performed on the universal remote. Pressing the DVD button would correctly coordinate the TV and the DVD player, but it would also mysteriously invoke some stupid non-surround mode on the amplifier, one of those awful digital signal processing (DSP) options that manufacturers add to surround receivers in order to impress potential customers who don't know how much they suck and how worthless they are. ("Wow. More than 40 DSP programs. What a deal.") They have names like Concert Hall, Stadium, 70mm Sci-fi, and Jazz Club. I think I'd actually pay more to get an amplifier that offered none of those sorts of things.

      Why do I hate them so? Basically, they're just gimmicks. They add some time delay to the signal going to the rear channels, or boost the low end to provoke a little more response from the subwoofer in order to create pseudo realism, but they always sound shitty to me. Hell, a coked-up audio engineer could create hundreds of such postprocessed effects modes just by sitting at a mixing board, twirling some dials, and hitting the Save button every time a new wave of endorphins were squeezed into his over-refreshed dopamine receptors.

      My real problem with DSP modes is that they're generic assumptions. I have no objection to some completely baked audio technician creating weird sound effects–I love the Flaming Lips, for example, and I've spent more than my fair share of time listening to Pink Floyd–but that's weirdness being created as part of the production process, stamped and approved by the band. Where do these DSP settings come from? Someone (who, to be fair, might not have been gobbling peyote buttons all afternoon) playing back some sounds and imposing a few digital parameters on the source material. Unfortunately, though, the movie or music you're listening to probably won't be the same material that Bobby the Engineer was listening to when Jazz Club or Concert Hall was created.

      It would be much better if the amplifier simply gave you the option of boosting a specific channel's decibel level or time delay. That's a measure of personal control you can only get (for some reason) on higher-end receivers, like the now-archaic Yamaha RXV-992 I used to own, a $1,400 purchase I made in 1999 mostly because I walked into a store and said, "I want more input plugs on the back of an amp than any sane person would ever require." As a result, it wasn't obsolete for nearly five years. It only had 10 of those phony DSP modes, and allowed me time-delay and volume control over the surround and centre channels.

      What did I do with all that power? I cranked the back speakers up 10 decibels (because they were much smaller than the psb Stratus Bronze towers I used for the front left and right channels), knocked about three decibels off the centre, and then balanced my two subwoofers, mostly by adjusting their physical positions in the room. (That was a long week, I don't mind telling you, fighting those standing waves that occur in the 80-hertz range inside a house constructed in 1910, when electricity was still a novelty and commercial radio broadcasts were nearly two decades into the future.)

      And then I stuck to the only sound-decoding modes that are realistic. Miraculously, those are the same options included with every purported surround-sound receiver, whether it has two DSP modes or 100. Ignore all those preprogrammed illusions of fictional rooms.

      This is reality: straight mono or stereo, Dolby Pro Logic I and II, Dolby Digital, DTS. Those are the only modes you should ever choose.

      Stereo you probably understand. It's been around for more than 40 years. Mono is something you should use for movie and music recordings older than that. Pro Logic is the standard for videotape: mono in the back channels and left-right-centre in the front. Pro Logic II is a later refinement of the original system, a way to get four channels decoded from the signals carried through a pair of stereo wires. There are probably some other benefits, but who the hell cares about four-channel anyway? That's so last century. We live in a 5.1 (or better) world these days.

      Which brings us to Dolby Digital and DTS (Digital Theater Systems). DTS is a higher-quality surround-sound format, but it never really caught on. If your amp has a chip to decode DTS, go ahead and buy that version of Saving Private Ryan; then you can hunt around for the other 100 or so movies encoded that way. But until you step up to SACD, Blu-ray, or HD DVD, Dolby Digital is all that the average DVD owner needs to worry about.

      Look at it this way. Movies for home consumption on DVD are professionally mixed to be delivered via Dolby Digital. Barring a few volume tweaks you might want to impose on that mix to accommodate flaws in your home-theatre environment, you have no reason (or creative right) to apply some distant engineer's abstracted concept of spatial audio to that arrangement, any more than you should decide that the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was intended to be played back in stereo, or that Buddy Holly's mono masterpieces should be parsed into five channels. You're bound to be wrong. For my friend, I reprogrammed the universal remote to select Dolby Digital every time the DVD player is engaged. That's what the discs are designed to provide, what they were engineered to supply, and what sounds right.

      Don't screw with what works.

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