I agree with David. If you are a tinkerer and want to mess with it, you can get some great surround effects using the Holophone mic or others like it. But as far as clients driving the demand, it never happened. In the past ten years, I have only delivered two projects that were specified to have a surround mix. Surround in the home kind of never happened properly. Sure, a lot of people have it, but few know what to do with it.

I think part of the issue is that while many consumers have a surround sound system in their living room, few of them had the knowledge or patience to correctly set up said surround system correctly and even fewer have a clue about what all of those surround option settings in the receiver are for. Another factor is most surround receivers have lots of "fake" surround modes, that actually sound pretty bad, but to the average consumer, the "sound coming out of all six or more speakers" fake surround settings are good enough. So if you are listening to everything with a fake surround mode that can even put mono sources out of all of the speakers, who cares if something is encoded with 5.1, 7.1 or ??

I think it is sort of like 3D at this moment. If you want to take the trouble and mess with it, some great results can be had, but how many video editors even have two accurate audio monitors in their edit bay, much less a fully calibrated and sound treated environment with 5.1 accurate monitoring? Very, very few, I would estimate perhaps 1% of all video edit bays? And how many people these days besides features and broadcast are budgeting for a professional audio post workflow? It is all left up to the video editor in so many projects.

Dan

Not to mention the cost of the license for the encoding codec to take the 5.1 mix to either Dolby Surround or DTS if the resulting program is going to be distributed or broadcast.