Surround sound is one of the biggest advances to have been made in audio reproduction for quite some time, Scott Wilkinson writes in 2 will get you 7.1 in Electronic Musician. But what about all the existing 2-channel content? Is there a way to expand it to fill a multichannel surround-sound system? Many have tried to devise algorithms that derive center and surround channels from a 2-channel source, but most of those algorithms produce less than satisfying results. Sonic Focus is taking a different approach to the problem. Instead of manipulating the signal’s phase and delay in various ways to simulate the extra channels, the company has developed an algorithm called Extrapolator that uses physical modeling to synthesize a multichannel sound field.”

Read on about Extrapolator and how the new algorithms could usher in a whole new era of high-quality multichannel audio from low-cost tools — a trend a great many of us heartily applaud.