December 06th, 2018

​SURROUND SOUND VS BINAURAL SOUND

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I’ve recently been mixing a project in surround sound and this got me thinking about the similarities and differences of surround sound and binaural sound. The physical differences between the two are obvious when we break them down a surround system runs from 5.1 or 7.1 in typical systems up to crazy big systems with 22.2 (the .1 or .2 of the systems refer to the sub driver) binaural sound requires 2 monitors best listened to with headphones.

Both of these systems create a sound field around the viewer to immerse them in a more realistic viewing environment, with the viewer in the centre point of these fields.The next difference with surround sound is that it is a mixing technique primarily instead of a recording technique. We take mono or stereo audio and place and move it within a surround field using a DAW.  




​Binaural on the other hand needs to be recorded using a stereo microphone, You can do this at home with 2 cardioid microphones placed approximately the same distance apart as your head and have the polar patterns opposite facing once you have your recording pan both tracks left and right depending how you orientate your mics and sound source and you have a makeshift binaural recording, there are purpose built microphones to do this with. In a short and butchered explanation a binaural microphone is an omnidirectional microphone that gives excellent depth of field to immerse a viewer. These microphones can be picked up for around $100 (aud) which isn’t to bad but going to the high end of the market they tend to be closer to 2K.

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​I made a quick demonstration of how this type of home binaural set up can sound like here;
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1GcZJ98p2BjWJBQsRhKBZJVZbXuL-cP4g

So what does this all give us as a comparison? Binaural is a 3D sound field that gives us excellent depth of field to locate sound sources and immerse the viewer but that is it its realistically only to be viewed by one person at a time. Surround sound creates a 3D sound field that gives us depth of field and helps us to distinguish sound sources and can be viewed by multiple users at the same time and has a sub. 

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