Audyssey DSX 2 Highlights
- Stereo to surround. Audyssey can take the stereo signal from your favorite shows, sports and movies and up-mix them for multiple channels. This ensures that all of your speakers are used allowing you to get immersed in whatever you watching.
- More enveloping surround sound. While 5.1 provides pleasing surround sound, more channels provide a completely seamless surround sound experience. So go beyond 5.1 to 7-, 9- or 11 channel set-ups. The Height and Wide channels make movies come alive.
- Scalable set-up. Audyssey DSX 2-enabled AVRs can deliver content specific to your speaker set-up, so you can build a sound system that perfectly complements your space and budget.
Audyssey’s Surround Sound Solution
Audyssey has the technology to up-mix your audio, so you’re never left with just standard stereo audio. Make everything you watch or hear surround sound. Audyssey DSX 2 will take that surround to new levels of envelopment with Height and Wide channels.
Most movies are mixed with five discreet channels and nearly every home and movie theater uses the 5.1 standard: five speakers and one subwoofer. Why? This goes back to film. When the standards for surround sound were developed there was only room on the film for 5.1 channels. But after years of research, Audyssey engineers made a break through: adding more channels in the right places will add psychoacoustic authenticity to the mix, making surround sound even better.
Audyssey DSX 2 not only creates Wide and Height channels, but also provides Surround Envelopment Processing to enhance Front and Back channels. The technology processes the standard surround signals in the time and frequency domains to improve the perceived sense of envelopment and blending with the other speakers in the surround system.
By expanding 5.1 sound, Audyssey DSX 2 technology delivers 7.1, 9.1 and 11.1 surround sound. The result isn’t just the most immersive, realistic home theater sound on the market, but a new standard in surround sound.
Technical Details
Why use more speakers?
Research in human hearing shows that we can hear many more directions than what current systems provide. We use the direct sound to localize the direction of sources and the reflected sound to perceive the size of the soundstage.
Experiments have shown that human localization is better in front than to the sides or behind. This means that for front-weighted content such as movies and most music, good engineering dictates that we employ more channels in the front hemisphere than the back. Imaging is also better horizontally than vertically and so good engineering also dictates that channels must first be added in the same plane as our ears before going to higher elevations.
Perception is not the only factor. The physics of room acoustics for music have been well studied, and their correlation with subjective impression increasingly understood over the last 30 years. This research has shown that we have strong built-in preferences for the direction, frequency response, and time of arrival of reflected sound. Additional channels and surround sound processing are needed to properly render these components.
Wides Before Heights
One key finding from the research is that first side wall reflections play a great role in determining subjective impression. The most important direction of reflected sound was found to be ±60° relative to the front. Audyssey DSX 2 provides a pair of Wide channels (LW and RW) at ±60° with appropriate frequency response and perceptual processing to match these requirements of human hearing. These Wide channels are much more critical in the presentation of a realistic soundstage than the Back Surround channels found in traditional 7.1 systems. Adding surround channels behind the listener has a very small impact compared to the increase in envelopment and soundstage width that the Wide channels provide.
The next most important acoustical and perceptual cues come from reflections above the front stage. Audyssey DSX 2 provides a pair of Height channels (LH and RH) that should be ideally positioned at a 45° elevation angle.