Penteo and Surround Sound

Much of my work over the last few years has been in broadcast and consumer (DVD/Blu-ray) promos and trailers. After years of procrastination, my clients finally pulled the trigger on mixing spots in surround sound. The problem I'm finding is that unlike the film world, where music score is often recorded and mixed in LCR or 5.1, the great majority of my source material is stereo only.

This was never a problem with stereo only mixing, but when it comes to 5.1, many times the only thing that ends up in the center channel is the voice over and dialog bites and the odd sound effect. The music was losing it's punch. Since much of the production or popular music that's used in today's promos has heavy phantom center information, you end up having to ride the music bed into oblivion to make room for the dialog or VO. I wanted to be able to dip the center panned information to clear that hole without having to also remove all of my left/right information.

I've tried the T.C. Unwrap and the Waves UM225 and UM226, and though all of these did take my stereo sources to surround, I was never too pleased with the results. All of these solutions did take stereo to surround, but none to gracefully. There was always a center that swam a bit and a phasey artifacting. Once you "unwrapped" your source, it would not downmix to stereo or mono without sounding like it was mixed in a swimming pool.

Then I got a call from Chris Stone, my old boss from the Record Plant days about Penteo. With John Wheeler at the helm, Tom Scott and Tom Kobayashi all invloved in the company, it had some great minds behind it, so I had to check it out.

At this point I have to say that since trying Penteo, I've become one of their evangelists here in Los Angeles, though I am not a paid employee of the company, nor have they flown me to Hawaii for a golf outing or given me center court seats to the Lakers.

After they sent me a set of .wav files that included the original stereo files and a Penteo processed LCR extraction. It was pretty impressive. Not only did it create a solid center channel from the existing phantom center, but a nice Left Right minus the center panned information.
Better yet, when I mono'd out the LCR extraction, it sounded exactly like the mono'd original stereo version. No swimming center or distracting phasing artifacts.

Quentin Tarantino even sent his vinyl collection to Penteo to process it for use in the Inglorious Basterds soundtrack.

For me, other than the obvious advantage to having LCR music cues available in a mix, the folks at Penteo can turn around music cues very quickly. In my trailer and promo world, where it seems we have to turn around spots in hours, quick turnaround is essential. Television and film mixers have also joined the ranks of the "get it done NOW" world, so having a team that can jump on a job is a great advantage.

Penteo is worth checking out. Give me a call at Post Haste Media and set up an appointment to come hear it or we can come to your facility and let you hear it on some of your own projects.