Matters Concerning Audio - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 166

Table 7-2 Audio Track Arrangements (Continued)

Tracks Speakers Description

THX 3 front floor, This is a system proposed by LucasFilm/THX that

Periphonic 3 front ceiling, embodies dual 5.1 surround systems, one at floor

2 rear floor, 2 rear level and the other at ceiling level, in order to

ceiling; a low- convey height and surround information to the ear.

frequency driver It became known as Periphonic.

at floor level and
another at the
ceiling level.

Be sure to properly license any DTS Digital Surround decoding software you
use from DTS. The open-source VLC player has had to remove DTS decod-
ing support due to a threat of legal action over patent violations.

A lot of useful information about surround-sound systems can be found at the Time
for DVD Web site.
There are some enhancements to the Mac OS at version 10.4 (known as the Tiger
release) that will be useful when managing complex audio projects. The system has an
audio-processing environment built in called CoreAudio. This manages the audio unit
plug-ins on a systemwide basis; the audio processing is available to any application that
cares to take advantage of it.
With the 10.4 release, the CoreAudio support provides much help with managing
multi-channel surround-sound mapping, and a lot of the headaches to do with keeping
tracks organized are now taken over by the OS and done automatically. This makes the
Mac OS platform a good choice for some production work at the high end.

Specialist audio processing tools such as Sound-Soap, E-Magic Logic, and
ProTools are worth purchasing and keeping available nearby to run a quick
audio-processing job when necessary.

Time for DVD: http://timefordvd.com/tutorial/SurroundSound.shtml
DTS: http://www.dtsonline.com/