"Stranger Things" surround sound

B

Bruce Watson

Veteran
My wife and I have been watching Stranger Things on Netflix. In the middle of this (it's only 8 eps) I took delivery of the last parts and completed upgrading my home theater to 5.1. Calibrated it with my AVR's built in Audyssey MultEQ XT32 and SubEQ HT. Fired it up and was pleased with the sound.

Until I listened to Stranger Things. Then I was just amazed. I never would have believed that 5.1 could add that much to the experience. It doesn't really add that much in the theaters for me. But with using just 5 speakers you don't smear the surround channels over the length of the side walls I guess. :tongue: What I get from Stranger Things is another level of immersion. Talk about supporting the story!

I do have questions about how sound designers deal with the surround channels. For example, in ep. 5 (I think) the sheriff is walking (running?) down a fully tiled hallway (tile floor, tile walls at least) like you might find in an athletic locker room for example. Sound reflecting everywhere. The sound designers nailed this. It put me right in the scene just like it should.

How was this recorded? I know it was recorded separately -- shoe sounds were Foley, etc. All layered up to make the final sound. But how did they nail the echoing so well? It sounds just so real. Could that be artificial reverb? If so, what was used? I'm not aware of any artificial reverbs that can hit four channels this well. It's just spot on.

Could it have been recorded on set (after filming)? If they could have done some of the Foley on set, how would they have mic-ed it? They'd just about have to use some kind of surround sound array. Double M/S? IRT cross?

In any case, my hat's off to Craig Henighan for his impressive sound design, and the rest of the sound crew for Stranger Things. Excellent work all. If you want an example that really explains the idea that "sound is 70% of what you see on screen" then watch Stranger Things with a good and well calibrated 5.1 sound system.
 
Yup it's all done in post and I have lots of different reverbs to simulate room space for Foley and the effects as well as dialogue.

Lexicon, TC6000, Yamaha SPX and various plug ins inc TL Space and Waves etc.

Creating four channel reverbs and room simulation is quite easy as reverb tends not to be very phase coherent anyway.
 
Now that hard drive space is ridiculously cheap I suspect more films really plan out the surrounds. Back when15 years or so, most films were mixed for the LRC and the surrounds generally had some of the LR splashed into them. A big action film would have surround elements cut separately to some extent.

There would be periodically these guys who would come in with some 4.0 - 5.1 recording setups trying to sell folks on the idea of recording at least ambiences that way. But the problem always came down to films create their environment so recording a surround fixed perspective BG is not generally all that useful. IF it was part of the original vision of the director and it was very planned and pre visualized so you could do the right setups in the right perspectives, maybe. The reality is that with very very very rare exceptions nothing like that is going to happen. You are often lucky if the sound post team is even partially in place before shooting ends. A lot of time post is scrambling to find get recordings of places that they would have had easy access to IF the production had just hired someone to do some FX recording while they were on location. You know things like lots of CU shots of Geese eggs hatching with no usable production because the crew is yacking over all of it and then six months later in sound post you find that geese only lay eggs once a year and well that is after the release date...

So to your point. The two biggest things that make a 5.1 home system sound better on most films is that dialog is now on it's own speaker and that A) makes the dialog easier to understand and B) keeps it out of the L/R and that really helps clarify the FX & music since they aren't sharing bandwidth.

I'm sure more films are paying attention to the surrounds and if done right it can be really amazing. 5.1 convolution reverbs have been a tool for a long time to place things (and it's one of the few tools that can place things outdoors in a non bouncy environment. like a field). Worldizing can also be done, though that is almost always done in editorial rather than the mix stage. I have also seen a lot more edit rooms set up with 5.1. That used to be strictly designer rooms. It's generally hard to do much surround planning/ editing if you can only play in stereo...

A very cool box that got used a bit in the 90's then Dolby bought it and buried it was the LAKE TheatrePhone surround simulator. Patch your 5.1 in and you get a very realistic surround environment in headphones. If you can find the boxes they are pretty cheap now but originally were ~$1,500. I picked one up new in the box for ~$150 a number of years ago.

Now that you are set up get a copy of Saving Private Ryan. That is a film that spent a LOT of times on the surrounds and sub content.
 
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