Not everyone is a fan of Quad

[DuncanS]

I

as a reply to the original question.. it's fascinating to see what the medical world has to say about the way that , since everybody is different, there is no "uniform" way to classify human hearing because we are all physiologially different...
my take has always been that , since all humans share the same "standard" listening equipment; two ears with spatial recognition discerning physiological microphones, us quad/MCH folk not only have a more refined "peripheral" hearing , but also use a bit more of our cortex to process the different sources, therefore , not classifying Surround as a gimmick, but as a bona fide way of perceiving music..

I'm with you on that one, we listen to the music, and surround helps us perceive it, its not something on in the background.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

as a reply to the original question.. it's fascinating to see what the medical world has to say about the way that , since everybody is different, there is no "uniform" way to classify human hearing because we are all physiologically different...
my take has always been that , since all humans share the same "standard" listening equipment; two ears with spatial recognition discerning physiological microphones, us quad/MCH folk not only have a more refined "peripheral" hearing , but also use a bit more of our cortex to process the different sources, therefore , not classifying Surround as a gimmick, but as a bona fide way of perceiving music..

In other words, we pay attention.

 

[jimfisheye]

[QUOTE="Anyway, on Audacity I took a 5.1 track and merged C & sub (tracks/mix and render to new track), dropped it 3 dB, and then diverted it to both fronts in the channel mapping menu before exporting. We'll see how that sounds...

How did it sound?

If you take a track (such as the center channel), lower it 3 dB, create a copy, then "mix & render" those two copies together, you will get something fairly different than the original track... I lower the channel I want to split by 5.5dB, and if I copy it and "mix & render" the two copies, I get something that looks almost exactly like the original channel (it's not exactly the same, however, but it's definitely close enough for my ears).

Do any audio engineers out there have a precise way to do this? What I'm doing sounds great to me, but I'd like to do it "right" [/QUOTE]

This is a little 'tech corner' digression here...

I use Reaper DAW like a "plugin" for speaker management.
You can route anything as you please with a DAW app. Like speaker managing 5.1 into a quad array.

Install Soundflower. It's a virtual audio device that lets you route audio between different apps on the computer.
Make an aggregate device of the audio interface you use for output + Soundflower. (Use your OS audio utility. Audio MIDI Setup in OSX. ASIO or ASIO4ALL in Windows I think.)
Select to send all system audio to Soundflower. (ie Make it your OS output device.)
Select the aggregate device in Reaper.

The 6 channels from the surround program are on channels 1-6 of the Soundflower bus.
Assign them. Do your routing/splitting/mixing for the desired speaker management. Route the output directly to your audio interface.

Once you're set up:
OS system output set to Soundflower.
Launch the speaker manager Reaper project.
Hit play on your favorite media player app.

Audio goes from the media player app to the Soundflower bus (because it's selected for OS audio), into Reaper, through your speaker management routing, and out to your audio interface (or HDMI receiver). No rendering files or other time consuming stuff. Set the proper speaker management and hit play. Live speaker management.