7.1 surround sound
eight-channel surround audio system commonly used in home theater configurations
7.1 surround sound is the common name for an eight-channel surround audio system commonly used in home theatre configurations. It adds two additional speakers to the more conventional six-channel (5.1) audio configuration. As with 5.1 surround sound, 7.1 surround sound positional audio uses the standard front left and right, center, and LFE (subwoofer) speaker configuration. However, whereas a 5.1 surround sound system combines both surround and rear channel effects into two channels (commonly configured in home theatre set-ups as two rear surround speakers), a 7.1 surround system splits the surround and rear channel information into four distinct channels, in which sound effects are directed to left and right surround channels (SL and SR), plus two rear surround channels (SBL and SBR).
In a 7.1 surround sound home theatre set-up, the surround speakers are placed to the side of the listener's position and the rear speakers are placed behind the listener. In addition, with the advent of Dolby Pro Logic IIz and DTS Neo:X, 7.1 surround sound can also refer to 7.1 surround sound configurations with the addition of two front height channels (LH and RH) positioned above the front channels or two front wide channels positioned between the front and surround channels.
History
Home entertainment
The Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD home video formats provide up to eight channels of lossless DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD or uncompressed LPCM audio at 96/48 kHz 24/16-bit, or lossy Dolby Digital Plus up to 48 kHz at 1024 kilobytes per second.
Cinema
While some movies have been remixed to 7.1 audio tracks on Blu-ray Discs for home cinema, the first discrete theatrical 7.1 soundtrack was Toy Story 3 in 2010. Other films with 7.1 soundtracks from 2010 include Step Up 3D, Megamind, Tangled, Tron: Legacy, Gulliver's Travels, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 2011 saw more films release with theatrical 7.1 audio, including Gnomeo & Juliet, Mars Needs Moms, Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Kung Fu Panda 2, Super 8, Green Lantern, Cars 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Captain America: The First Avenger.
The public source identifies “7.1 surround sound” as eight-channel surround audio system commonly used in home theater configurations. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around surround, sound and eight-channel.
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This entry incorporates text from “7.1 surround sound” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.