First time setup with surround same speakers for stereo out?

Im setting up my first surround template, 5.1 or maybe 7.1 but could use some pointers from others who did this before me.

  1. If I do a stereo and surround mix on the same template, can the stereo L+R be the same physical out ( speakers ) as the FL + FR ? or does that cause issues.

  2. My sub is a home studio style where it has stereo ins and a set of stereo outs to the near fields. In a center + sub setup, is it okay to route the sub to FL + FR ? It seems kinda hacky , unless I’m wrong.

  3. Should I not even bother with a stereo mix / out in a surround template? Should I just route the 5.1 or 7.1 or Atmos if I have that and then bounce to stereo later?

  4. VEP PRO ! … I hear back and forth on using or not using the surround plugin of VEP PRO 7. If anybody here uses VSL servers in a surround format, what’s a high level rundown?

My two cents…

  1. If you use Control Room you can then set up a surround output that feeds channels 1-6 and a stereo output that feeds 1-2 only. No problem, you can use the same outputs (in control room). When you switch between speaker sets Nuendo will adjust and there won’t be doubling.

  2. I wouldn’t do that. If you route L/R through the sub then that path is different from the center channel. I would keep the sub as LFE only as long as LCR is full range more or less. If need the extension to get to full range for LCR then set up bass management separately. In either case you’d feed your sub from output 4 (assuming L,R,C,LFE,LS,RS) and that output would either get only the LFE channel or the LFE and bass management channels.

  3. I would set it up to do both in one setup. No reason why not. It’s much better to be able to switch back and forth with a single key stroke. On top of that you might actually find that it’s easier to edit production sound/dialog on just the center speaker for example, and so if you always work in the same ‘wider’ template that’s easy enough to set up, and then you can easily just switch over to stereo for your mix.

And come to think of it it’s also more convenient to have a wider format as a starting point for those cases where people then decide that they wanted a surround mix after all and not just stereo.

PS: I’m talking mainly about Control Room setups now. You can have the same CR setup and have templates that make us of all of it or just part of it. So just because you set yourself up for both in CR doesn’t mean you can’t set up your templates as stereo-only…

1 Like

Thanks Mattias!

does the surround setup adjust the LFE freq automatically? like say a cutoff at 80 or 120 or whatever?

Not as far as I know. You’ll have to set that up.

Okay cool. Thanks again Mattias!

I think that’s a question you’ d better ask here:
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