A Brief History of Surround Audio

The first attempt at introducing a surround format to the general public was the quadrophonic recordings of the early 1970's. The format eventually failed due to problems with the delivery formats and competing industry standards.

Vinyl was replaced by the Compact Disc which meant that proponents of surround were out of luck since surround was not possible in the CD specification. In 1994, entertainment giants Matsushita, Disney, Sony, Viacom, MGM/UA, Paramount, and Time/Warner got together to develop a new format to replace the CD that would include surround, but failed to reach agreement. Sony/Phillips had announced their own standard. A month later the others proposed a different standard. Another year of negotiating produced a new alliance called the DVD Forum.

The DVD Forum released the DVD-Video format in 1996 but it was not until January 1998 that , after lengthy consultations with the music industry, they released a draft DVD-Audio standard. In March 1999, they released the final version 1.0 of the DVD-Audio specification.

Meanwhile on the consumer end, during the mid 1990's the hardware became available to recreate the theater experience at home with big-screen TVs and surround audio systems. Many movie titles were mixed in surround which was then encoded into two channels on VHS cassettes. As the better quality picture formats first of Laser Disc and later DVD Video started to be released more and more titles featured surround sound. Now you can buy a receiver at Costco that is equipped for surround, in fact you can't buy one that isn't!