@EMR; A couple things. I hope I didn't give the impression that -C0 was a preferred setting (4.0 vs. 5.0), I just meant that
reducing the width of the center would move more of the sound away from center. I recommend adjusting it via live listening, but I get that that is a challenge in your situation. Listening to JUST the center (center channel solo'd) lets you adjust the center width so vocals there are "full" sounding, yet sounds from what would otherwise be in the fronts are not intruding. Then similar for the front width controls. If you were able to alternately solo the fronts and rears, you could make the front width adjustment in a similar fashion.
Center widths of maybe 15 or so wouldn't surprise me, but less than that would (unless you really wanted "quad"/no center channel).
I haven't tried it but maybe there is a way to get a mixed down to stereo output from your PC with SpecWeb Play (or maybe that's a feature I should look at adding). Nothing solo'd would be 5.1 mixed down to stereo, but you would still be able to solo or mute individual channels (that feed the mixdown).
I guess I don't know if you have a way (short of getting close to individual speakers) of listening to isolated channels in your 5.1 system.
Re loudness and waveforms, there are post separation steps (with the default settings anyway) that are going to affect loudness and therefore the way the waveforms look. There is a "remastering" (essentially a mastering limiter) applied, and then a normalization. These things can be turned off, however, for purposes such as seeing a change in the waveforms.
-v0 (lowercase vee, followed by a zero) would turn off the mastering limiter. -z0 (lowercase zee followed by a zero) turns off the normalization.
One more point on waveforms vs. sound. If you have access to or have seen results from Penteo upmixer, all the waveforms always look "the same". Looking at the waveforms you would think it was just the left and right channels repeated in LS and RS, and yet the sound is different (I can't fully explain that myself
).
Anyway I always try to refer people to the "DKA" approach, although it is somewhat out of date as to today's defaults. It's in the guide, under
How To Win With ArcTan (a mini guide from a contributor). I guess I will try to further updated it for the full 2.3 or 2.4 release, but I'll paste the existing langague in here (as I can't seem to get anyone to read the guide
) Note that the actual article in the guide also has graphics and other additional info.
This is a guide we’ve shared in the past with some SBU members who were having a difficult time navigating through the different controls in ArcTan. Working this way has allowed me to work quicker, and has removed some of the guesswork with ArcTan. As with everything else, this is not a foolproof guide to ArcTan, but I do find that it gives me a running start with a majority of albums across genres.
If starting with your standard rock album, mixed without any hard left or right vocal panning, with not a lot of crazy vocal reverb, I have my ArcTan settings at the following (Note, these are not all any longer the default values for SpecWeb):
Image Width: 290
Center Width: 75
Front Width: 90
Mode: Across
Adjacent Speaker: .03 with wrap OFF
Here is where the tweaking starts. I live monitor my rears closely at these settings, but with the rear Slice blend set to 0.0 (which is “off”). If I can eliminate most of the vocal in the rears on a track without doing anything else, or at least enough that they're well-masked unless your ear is right at the speaker, I'm done. If not, I'll try slightly raising my center and front width, but not too much. Too much makes the soundfield too front-dominant. I'll also try "sum" mode rather than "across." If I'm still not there, this is where the ArcTan with Slice blended rears come in.
I then switch to ArcTan/Slice and have my Slice humidity’s at .9 and .95, and start slowly moving the rear blend control away from 0.0 until it sounds good to me. Some tracks take a lot. Some tracks only take a little.
There are some tracks where all this is hopeless because of a more reverb-y vocal, or a track where instrumentation is spare or the vocal is just mixed way up front. This is where I give up on isolating the vocal and see whether "diagonal" mode in ArcTan does a good job at giving me some nice instrumentation back there, but not worry so much about complete vocal isolation. In all probability, the listener is going to experience the vocal up front anyway. I then continue the same process with the Slice rear blend until I like what I hear.
That's pretty much how most of my conversions go. Absolutely use ZAG.
I note he's kind of working from the rears towards the fronts, whereas I have mentioned started with the center and working back.
Again those are no longer all the defaults (with peoples preferences and new methods included) but there is certainly no doubt that DKA's work stands out as amazing upmixing (we used to prefer the word "conversion" to upmixing because of all the negative connotations around poorly done upmixes).
If you want the DKA starting settings they would be:
-i290 for image width to 290 (but that is still the default)
-c75 for center width
-f90 for front width
-D0 Back to Constant power panning vs. today's Zone placement
-m1 for Across, -m2 for Diagonal vs. today's Zone2
-M1 for Arctan, -M0 for Slice, -M2 for Arctan with Slice blended rears
-a0.03 for adjacent speaker to 0.03 (but that is still the default)
-l and -r are the Slice Blends
-o -t and -w are the Slice Stage One Humidity, Stage Two Humidity, and Wrap Rears, respectively.
Hope this helps. Good discussion anyway. Helps me understand what needs to be made more clear and features that might be helpful, etc.
