Welcome To QQ!
Boy did I ever have a case of deja vu reading this post
I have been doing upmixes for a long time - hope it hasnt been 16 years but I started with EOH and have used all the methods that he and Kempfand have developed.
This was a regular discussion - EOH hated the artefacts and was a huge proponent of ambiance type conversions - me - well I was always after discreteness and seperation, and argued that you dont listen to the rears in isolation but to the overall 5.1 presentation. My favourite method was one called called SMACS and today SPEC is my method of choice and it is the best because it provides ways to get better results. A few things that I do to deal with the artefacts is to apply some post processing using Soundforge such as multidynamics and de-essing.
Also unfortunately as the web version of SPEC was introduced - I was hearing some things I wasnt happy with and Glenn has been steadily improving - I am using at least 3 versions that are alpha;s and not released, and it is definately better..
I will agree with you that there are quite often significant artefacts - mainly in the surrounds.. You can reduce them by upping the LS and RS blends - this though gives less seperation in the rears - obviously using 24/96 or 24/192 source stereo files results in better quality.
As good as SPEC is - how the stereo was originally mixed will really determine how good your results will be - in a general sense, I find that I get 1/3 of the albums result in conversions that I am very happy with - 1/3 are decent and acceptable - and 1/3 just do not convert well, and these ones I dont bother keeping.
I am not concerned about your comment that bad conversions will flood the internet primarily because not much lately has been posted, but more importantly, this SPECWEB and Garry's Helper are making this easy to do - why bother grabbing conversions from the net when you can do them yourself and do the music YOU like?
What a very nice reply and how recognizable ! Nice to meet someone who obviously followed the same path as me.
i became a member in 1998 of the Doom9 forum. My hobby back then was to grab the complete sound from movies, edit out all speech and left with a wav containing all music played in that movie. Unfortunately writeable CD's were very expensive so I made MP3 out of them........ Biggest mistake ever ;-) I wish I still had those files in lossless ! After hearing 5.1 DTS CD's (Santana Abraxas and Alan Parsons On Air) I became interested in surround. But back then in 1999 nowhere were intructions how you could do that yourself. But in 1999/2000 EoH published the first ever stereo to surround method for the masses. My first conversion blew me away and I was hooked ;-) It took more than 10 hours to do a conversion !
Since that time I followed EoH. And although I was very passive on forums, I did read all I could find and built up enough knowledge. I never posted anything on a forum besides some thank you's for methods and conversions but I reacted directly to EoH by email. And that lead to a friendship that is still alive after 16 years.
I followed him to all his forums, tried every method I could find, not only those made by EoH and Kempfand. I was also on the "secret forum" ! And yes I remember SMACS ..... it was very similar in it's results to QSXTPRO IRRC.
It was a real disaster what happened on that secret forum and I asked EoH by email if I am allowed to tell here what was really wrong. He has no objections if I inform you.
EoH suffered from a lot of diseases. He had cancer in 2003 and problems with his veins in 2004 ..... In 2008 I noticed (and with me others on that forum) his character changed. He became overprotective about his own methods and had a lot of fights with all kind of people, even on non related subjects like the Beatles vs Roling Stones ..... In 2009 I got an email that all people would leave the secret forum to start a new one (SBU), but I was an EoH adept and decided not to go along with all those (for me !) foereigners who showed little respect to the man who invented it all ! It's like you say ..... most people who do stereo to surround for a longer time, began with an EoH method. But even I got into some arguments with EoH and I lost contact. Then suddenly in 2010 I got a very friendly email from him, without any of the paranoia he showed in 2008/2009. It seemed he was the EoH I knew again. Very generous in sharing it's methods and always helping newbies where possible. When I asked him what changed, he told me the story....... In the first months of 2008 EoH got problems with the nerves in his hands, fingers and toes. He suffered from Neuropathy. The doctor put him on a medicin that at first didn't help enough but after increasing the amount of pills, it did help a lot. It was however a medicin that also had a lot of nasty side-effects on his character and behaviour. He became paranoid and saw an enemy behind every tree. He told me that he wasn't aware of it during the time he swallowed those pills. He stopped in October 2009 and in early 2010 he was himself again !
So it's a rather sad story that a man has a disease and because of that disease loses his "life-work" . But I did understand what happened, because his behaviour was really outreagous without him recognizing it. In 2010 he told me that he never had the intention to get into all those fights, but he didn't make excuses for it, because he didn't realize it at that time when he was filled with pills. He also told me he didn't want to publish that on SBU because it would look like a
cheap excuse, which IMO it isn't, but I can understand his decision. So now I told what was themain reason why everything went wrong at a certain moment with him. He still has a lot of diseases but is the old EoH again !!
Well, I guess you know now I tried every method and can get reasonable results out of SPEC, but I am still worried about how SPECWEB will influence the Dutch "surround-scene" . And BTW it's not only the artefacts, a lot of songs done with SPEC behave a bit like a triangle in surround instead of 5 speakers. Fronts with -16 RMS -6 peak and rears with -19 RMS and peak 0.1 will give you a lot more rears orientated sound than you wish for. And that's also an issue fixed in EoH's WAMINU. It has separation and crystal clear sound and is mastered like modern loud CD's. And that's also it's shortcoming : when you try a stereo CD that is RMS -10 and peak 0, you cannot use WAMINU and those albums. If I really want to have a conversion of such an album, I grab SPEC.
Based on peaklevel is giving those triangle like sounds. A peak level can be ONE sample in a whole song with 44.1 samples a second, right ? It's better to use the RMS values as base...... and that's what WAMINU does with it's mastering process. And on 75 % the separation is almost equal to that of SPEC !
The numbers are the same here : 1/3 A+ 1/3 B 1/3 a C or lower ;-)
Nice challenge : Gentle Giants Octopus : song 1,2 and 5 are upmixes in DTS with the Penteo method. Rip the stereo 24/96 and try that one. LOL ! WAMINU and SPEC gave a better result than Penteo !!!!! But........ nagging mode....... SPECWEB with the artefacts, WAMINU without ! Incredible Steve Wilson uses That Penteo stuff ;-)
Well, I hope I made things a bit more clear with this and previous reply and I hope I gave yo'll enough information to reconsider your views about EoH. I think he will really appreciate that !!
