Albums in 5.1 surround

Jerry Harrison had some stuff to say in that TapeOp interview:

I just worked with Ed remixing all of the Talking Heads albums for Atmos.

-You mixed everything in 5.1 before, right?

That was with Eric “ET” Thorngren. [See Eric’s interview this issue.] He did the bulk of the catalog. Ed did (Talking Heads:) 77, and he did about half of More Songs About Buildings and Food, and then Eric did the other half. Because Eric and I still had the sessions from the 5.1, we had a head start on thinking about this. When we were doing the 5.1, we listened to all of these different (surround) records. There were certain people who wanted to make mixes feel like you were on stage, with the musicians around you.

-Yeah, some strange placement of the listener, as if you’d joined the band.

We felt that was not a very successful way to look at it. The other thing is that we realized that people would have these stereo systems, and then who knew what the rest of the speakers would be. We used the faux center of stereo, as long as it was then reinforced with the center speaker. By the time that we’ve now reached with Atmos, people have more sophisticated systems. I think that surround audio could be wonderful, but the majority of people who are going to be listening to Atmos will probably be listening to it on headphones, to begin with.