SRS Labs wants us to forget about our speakers
SRS Labs' suite was sportin' a number a devices showcasing Surround Everywhere, technology that lets you enjoy surround sound anywhere you go, laptops, phones, so yeah, anywhere. But the coolest thing we came away with was their vision of how surround sound should be mastered. Many in the industry are strungling with the transition from 5.1 to 7.1 and let's face it, about the time the studios get their arms around 7.1, we'll be asking for 9.1. So this new idea is to record where the audio is supposed to come from, instead of which speaker it should be played on. This way a movie would never need its audio remastered again, because the fact that the plane coming in at 2 O'Clock wouldn't change no matter how many speakers you had, it wouldn't even matter if you had a speaker placed precisely at 2 O'Clock. So basically your AVR would render the audio on the fly based on the number of speakers, and where you placed those speakers by using the recorded sounds and the data about those sounds. Kinda blew your mind right? The problem of course is at this point its just a cool idea and until content is created this way, there's no chance we'll actually be able to realize the benifits of this dream. Either way, we do commend SRS Labs for dreaming.
