Introduction to Surround Sound Setup

As part of the ongoing learning for the final year of the HND we are looking at Surround Sound technieques and the use of a Focusrite Saffire Pro 56 that can be used as a portable 8 channel Preamp that works in conjunction with a laptop (can be either Windows or Mac, long as it supports Firewire) which facilitates the ability to handle multchannel surround sound.

So part of the setup trial done this morning, as a group we looked at setting up an OCT-Surround (Optimum Cardioid Triangle-Surround) microphone array which requires 5 microphones to work.

The chosen setup for this, features a center mic using the Neumann u87 in Cardioid polar pattern, a left and right pic setup using the Octava MK-012 with hypercardioid capules fitted with a matched pair of Neumann KM184's for the rear stereo pair (cardioid).

The basic distances for the OCT setup are with the left and right channel mics 80cm apart from each other, with the front center set dead center at 40cm with a distance of 8cm forward of the Left/Right pair. The rear pair also set to 40cm back from the front pair while being setup at 20cm wider then the front Left/Right Pair.

These were connected to the Saffire Pro 56 and tested to work on the Laptop using Protools.

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