I wrote before that I would like to do some music with surround sound in the future. Preferably music for a movie or a documentary. (well keep on dreaming). I already put up the surround speakers in studio on specially made stands, but last week I did the cabling of these speakers. They are hooked up to an SPL surround controller, but I also needed a surround decoder. I found this little box from Teuffel. A German company that makes speakers, but also makes these stand alone DTS 5.1 decoders. I must say I really works fine.
You can see the Eminent media player on the Mixcube. It is a very small box but it streams everything from mp3, divx, mkv and you can even hook up a DVD or Bluray player, but I mainly stream audio from a little NAS file server. You can also see the found speakers sets I have in the studio now. From left to right. My Genelec 8250's those are my main stereo monitors, then the Mackies HR-824 MK1's , Avantone mix cubes and on the upper right the Behringer Thruths. I have five of them with a sub as my 5.1 monitor setup now.
Here is on of the surround speakers in the back. Today I tested everything and tried to get the levels and delays of the surround setup right. I must say I sounds very nice on this set. Not bad at all :) Below the Behringer and right of the Mix Cube you can see the SPL surround controller. It has a big knob to control the volume of all 6 surround channels at the same time. You can also select between two surround and two stereo sources. And you can also hookup a stereo monitor set. I route this signal back to my stereo controller. And from there I route also a signal to one of the SPL's stereo input. So in this way I can also use the behingers as a stereo reference. In the eminent I can also switch to HDMI or SPDIF audio. The SPDIF port goes to the Teuffel Surround Decoder and the HDMI audio out goed to a HDMI switch that can extract the audio again on SPDIF. And that one I route to my stereo setup. So I can listen to a movie from the Eminent on my Genelecs too. I hope you can still get it all. But actually anything can go anywhere :)
Here is a picture I took without flash from the screen that I project on. It is an electric screen that I can also put up when I don't need it. You also see that the same picture is also on the left and right LCD screen, that I usually use as extra screens on my PC's in the studio. I can do that because those screens are both hooked up to HDMI switches with multiple outputs and the beamer is connected to those switches as well. I do the same trick on there as I do with my sound monitors. I connect the output from the first to the input of the second switch and back. In this way I can put the picture of any source on any of these three screens. Very convenient. 
And here is another overview with all the screens. Doesn't it look nice? :) Oh and just in case you are wondering which movie is playing on the screens. It is Monsters Inc. I love those computer animated movies. I'd love to do some 3D work myself, but unfortunately no talent there ;) I can do some video editing. And that is what I'd like to do some day. Make a DVD or even better a Bluray with some video's and surround versions of some of my better tracks from my albums. A sort of 'best of', but that will take a long time I'm afraid before that will be done. First some more solo work on CD. The only thing left now todo is hook up a HDMI over UTP converter to get rid of the long loose HDMI cable that is hanging in my studio now. And I still need to hook up the outputs of the RME fireface 800 (on my video PC) to the surround controller. More about that next week :)
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