I was only able to skim over the article, but I'll make a couple comments.
I believe that for music only applications, the LFE channel more a liability than an advantage. It is also
MONO.
There are very few instruments that go down in the range that
truly need a dedicated LFE channel to reproduce them. It is worth noting that even if your main speakers have a nominal low frequency limit of something like 50Hz, as you increase the number of speakers to at least the three that is the front of a home theater setup, the bass response will be extended somewhat by mutual coupling of the woofers. The result is more bass output and a lower frequency limit than one speaker alone can produce. (I'm assuming here that the bass is in all three front channels, which it will be to a certain extent in an acoustic recording of something like an orchestra).
In any event, if the speakers are set to "small" then the bass will be routed to the subwoofer, which
can reproduce the bass (although it will be
mono bass).
For music masters that are intended for mixing into a film, there usually
is an LFE track that
usually has both redundant and/or 'synthesized' bass information. This "synthesized bass" is usually the normal bass that has been passed through a sub-harmonic synthesizer to create an octave below the real bass. By the way, the finished LFE track in film mixing is sometimes created by this same procedure, with a sub-harmonic synthesizer, usually made by DBX, augmenting the lowest octave of the sound effects, and as I said, some of the music.
If you have the "Superman" (the first installment) DVD that has the re-created soundtrack, there are selections from the score that are seperate from the film as bonus material. I mixed these in my studio in 5.0. I did not want to use an LFE channel because I wanted the music to be as un-corrupted as possible from the original masters I had. The mix of the music in the actual film
does have music in the LFE,
but it was synthesized on the dubbing stage and did not exist in the original mastersYou may prefer one or the other of the mixes, but the one on the 5.0 tracks is more representative of what the original masters sounded like when I played them in my room.
By the way, and as a bit of trivia: The "Main Titles" music that takes place when the titles are sweeping off the screen was recorded on the original masters
1/4 tone flat! I can't for the life of me figure out why - all the other music cues were recorded at correct pitch. As a result of this, and to keep the music in the original sync as it was when the original film was mixed, I had to digitally speed up the master to make it match. The result of this is that the sound is somewhat strident and the timbre of the instruments is corrupted by a small amount.
All the rest of the score does not have this problem.
By the way, Sound & Vision did a feature article on this DVD in the June 2001 issue. I have a couple quotes in it and my picture is also in there (in case you need a new dartboard
) There are scans of the article here: It has 4 pages.
page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 [This message has been edited by soundhound (edited January 28, 2003).]