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Re: Circle Surround

209.240.200.174

Posted by Hayden on March 20, 2000 at 11:39:23

In Reply to: Re: Circle Surround posted by HR GUY on March 20, 2000 at 10:56:35:

The unit I have is the original Circle Surround 5.2.5
decoder by Rocktron (it may still be available,I don't know for sure but could find out, list $999 and worth every penny). This unit has music mode (no delays, just the hall ambience from out of phase information in the recording,it works great, wouldn't want additional delays
for music btw). It also has video surround mode which gives a fixed 30ms delay to the surrounds. This really works great with movies,though I suppose an adjustable
delay would have been more room friendly (30ms might be too much for some rooms). It also has a wide steering button for the rears where hard pans go to the rears,again
great on movies, I turn it off on music. I'm using monopoles (Vandy VSM's) in the rear. I personally like
dipoles/bipoles for dolby surround sources, not for Dolby
Digital,DTS or music surround. To me discrete(DD,DTS, which CS sounds like) pans don't sound right through dipoles/bipoles,with monopoles
a pan(say the dragon in Dragonheart DTS) is clearly delineated, not so to my ears with di/bi-poles. There is such an increased sense of ambience with the stereo surrounds from CS, that to me there is no need for di/bi-poles which are more needed with the mono rears of
Dolby Surround/THX. I guess an external delay to the rear
outs of the CS unit would work, if used with the unit in
music mode, otherwise you'd be doubling delays if in video
mode. I personally feel delays are good only for movies,not music. Smart Devices bought rights to Circle Surround technology sometime early last year (I think) and
just started marketing the Circle Surround EX heavily
recently,what with Dolby EX etc., coming out. Its reviewed
in the current Widescreen Review. This is a smaller unit
that is supposed to be an EX add-on to other surround decoders. They have a small $249 unit and a $299 one. The
$299 one has full channel capability. But it does not
have the modes,delay,bandwith,soundfield and treble reduction (for bright soundtracks) that the original CS 5.2.5 has. The only provision on that unit for a sub is
for the rear channels. I'd say checkout the current issue of Widescreen Review. As an aside, the dealer I purchased
the unit from was considering carrying the Theta line just
because they were adding CS to their options. He ordered a
couple of units to test/audition. He told me it sounded inferior to the CS 5.2.5 units. Probably due to the fact that in the Theta everything was converted to digital before passing through the CS decoder chipset. There was no analog bypass. Interesting. Hope this book :) helps.

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