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From “Spider” to the “House Display”:  

10 years RTW's SurroundMonitor - 10 years of 5.1 Surround visualization at RTW

This year RTW celebrates the tenth anniversary of the SurroundMonitor. In 1999, our engineers created a fundamental new possibility to visualize and display surround sound. Until that point in time, there had been virtually no dedicated visual surround monitors with more than just simple multichannel meters available on the market. RTW’s very first SurroundMonitor set the scene for innovative vector presentation and paved the way for the Surround Sound Analyzer with the intuitive understandable house-shaped display, which today is well know around the world.

One of the earliest observations RTW engineers made in the late nineties was that traditional visualization techniques are inappropriate for displaying some of the complex parameters and interplay of multichannel audio in a clear, practical, and intuitive way. As a result, RTW’s very first SurroundMonitor set the scene for innovative vector presentation by displaying the five main channels of a 5.1 signal; because of its shape, this presentation was also referred to as “spider”. 

The SurroundMonitor 10800, which is recognizable from its two independent upright-type TFT displays, marked the beginning of RTW’s dedicated and practice-based refinement of visual surround-audio monitoring. 

Soon thereafter, the Surround Sound Analyzer was developed based on the original vector presentation and implemented for the first time in the SurroundMonitor 10800X in 2001. The Surround Sound Analyzer, in the meantime an integral part of all surround-enabled visualization systems by RTW, also has been licensed to Tektronix® and been implemented in the Waveform Monitor and the AMM-768. Today, the Surround Sound Analyzer is the preferred surround-monitoring tool for many audio professionals all over the world.  

“The original spider meanwhile has changed to a house”, says RTW managing director Andreas Tweitmann. “But this doesn't change anything to the fundamental development to display surround signals not only with level meters but with intuitive understandable vector graphics. RTW's engineers established this important innovation for the visualization of audio signals ten years ago - and still today they are engaged in the continuous development and refinement of this technology.”

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Overview of the available instruments

How it works – the display of the Surround Sound Analyzer

Download product information See Surround in Action