Music is muffled on 5.1 export

Question

Hi

I am working on a fan edit of a movie with 5.1 audio. I am using music from the soundtrack of the movie (using a stereo .flac file) for some of the transitions. When listening to the audio in Premiere Pro or exporting the audio in stereo it sounds fine. However, if I export the audio to 5.1 the music from the soundtrack sounds noticeably poorer quality than the music from the movie.

I have changed the lfe volume and center percentage values on the tracks with the music, but it hasn't made much of a difference. Is there anything else that should be done to make the stereo audio sound closer to the actual movie music audio? Or is this just not possible due to the soundtrack audio being in stereo?

Cheers

Ollie5DC6 · Accepted Answer

Hey Kevin

I was able to find a .flac version of the .wav music, but the result ended up being the same (after doing the stuff in Audition). This particular piece of music seems to be more muffled when exported than the others, I'm not sure what about it makes it so muffled when exporting to 5.1, it seems to have the same specifications as the other files (same bitrate, sample rate, etc). I can upload the clip to Google Drive if that makes it easier to understand the problem.

I've tried listening to it with the surround sound setting turned on on my headphones, and it kind of sounds better, not sure if this is just a hardware issue.

Cheers

Okay so it turns out I think the issue may have been with the way that the audio is exported. For testing I was exporting to AAC 5.1, but I also had a version exported as separate .wav files which were then converted to .dtshd, and the dtshd audio sounds much better than the AAC version.

Thank you Kevin for your support, I appreciate your help throughout the process!

Michael Grenadier · Answer

I'm pretty sure the only way to accurately judge a 5.1 mix is with a 5.1 monitoring setup...  That's certainly the way I've always worked the couple of times I've had a 5.1 mix for a film.  Hard to predict how whatever you're playing it with is mixing the 6 tracks to stereo which I assume is the way your monitoring it.   You could try listening to each track separately to see if there is actually any muffling...    How are you assigning the music stereo audio to the 5.1 mix...

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