Pro Tools 8: Pro Tools for Film and Video All of these effects can be used to create a very full surround mix without ever calling attention to the theater space. The Waves 360° Surround Tools offers several great tools to create a very spatial three-dimensional mix that never calls attention to itself. This can also be done just with levels and stereo plug-ins, just delaying the music in the sides by a frame (41.6 ms) can create a very spatial effect in most of the theater seats. And due to the Haas effect, the sound still feels like it is coming mostly from the screen. Low frequency effects The .1 in 5.1 stands for the LFE or low frequency effects channel. Although we all tend to call this a subwoofer, it's not a subwoofer in the home stereo sense. On home satellite systems there are five small speakers and a sub. In a satellite system the five front and surround speakers are not full range, lacking any woofer at all. For this reason the low frequencies from these channels plus the LFE are routed to the sub, the system's only woofer. This is handled in the decoder-preamp and is tuned to the surround system. This is not the case in a theater. In a theater the speakers are full range, often with a good 15-inch woofers. Each channel is simply routed to the proper speaker or speakers and the LFE is sent to the LFE subwoofer. This is a true subwoofer meant to reproduce bone rattling bass effects. Only effects intended to really boom at the low end should be sent to the LFE channel. If you are mixing on a satellite monitor system, rather than full range monitors, the management of how much bass is sent from the five front and surround channels needs to be handled by a plug-in or external device that properly tunes the sub to the speakers and the room. If you mix bass into the LFE because the bass is lacking in the five front and surround speakers, in playback, on either a full range theater system or a home satellite system, this will produce way too much bass. The Waves M360 Surround Manager is designed for just this purpose. Although this is an issue of studio setup ( covered in Chapter 1), it is critical to understand this concept while mixing to avoid over cranking the bass. Routing sound to the LFE can only be done by routing the sound to one or more of the other five channels and then route the extreme bass to the LFE. This is because the LFE can only reproduce frequencies at the very low end of the spectrum. If thunder is sent to the LFE, it will not sound anything like thunder. At best it will sound like a low rumble. The higher frequencies need to be played through a full range speaker or speakers to keep their characteristic sound. This is why the 5.1 pan window has no direct assign for LFE, but rather a slider that adds the LFE to the five speaker pan system. When a stereo track is routed to the LFE, the extreme lows are mixed to mono and routed to the mono LFE. 212