Channel Order Trap in 5.1 Audio (Game Audio Bytes #3)

When making Kingdom Come: Deliverance, we almost delivered the music in half of the cutscenes in the wrong 5.1 channel order. Watch this video to see what happened, how we fixed this, and how we started preventing this from happening again.

0:00 Introduction
0:35 Audio files often come without channel labels
1:02 Mono is safest
1:10 Stereo has 2 possible orders
1:49 5.1 channels: Film standard L-C-R-Ls-Rs-LFE
2:38 Stereo downmix from 5.1
2:58 5.1 channels: SMPTE standard L-R-C-LFE-Ls-Rs
3:15 Kingdom Come: Deliverance 5.1 experience
4:25 Listening exercise: Can you spot the wrong stereo downmix?
5:03 What exactly happened?
5:31 How to fix the channel order?
6:04 Channel mismatch prevention
6:28 Can this issue be ignored? Spoiler: No.

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Game Audio Bytes repository (almost empty now, more content to be added later):
https://github.com/adam-sporka/game-a...

Kingdom Come: Deliverance OST:
https://kcdsoundtrack.com

Get Kingdom Come: Deliverance:
https://www.kingdomcomerpg.com/

https://adam.sporka.eu

Keywords: #gameaudio, channel order, 5.1, surround, spatial audio, infrastructure, project setup, bloopers, exercise