Lt/Rt and steering

[mr.armadillo]

I'm kind of new to the Lt/Rt world, so bear with me.

I've been asked to create a Lt/Rt from my 5.1 mix. First, I did a LCRS downmix, adding the bandlimited LFE information to the LCR and lowering the surround about -8db. Basically, the mix consists of very wide, spacious ambient music, some sound fx and vo. When monitoring through the Dolby SR encoding/decoding chain, there was quite a lot of music going in the surrounds, and I noticed the voice drifting from the center to the right channel at times, which I believe is called "steering", right? Lowering the volume of the music did help keeping the center in place - but are there any other ways to avoid this kind of drifting? Am I missing something here?
Thanks!

[Craig F]

making the music more mono will help
maybe some moderate band filtering

[georgia]

Dolby surround decoders take the in-phase information and steer it to the Center channel. It takes the completely out of phase information and steers it to the Rears. Try shifting some of your main tracks to a bit less of a full stereo signal. Do this while you listen to the mix passing thru the encoder/decoder pair so you can hear whats happening. Also, try shifting your materials in the overall mix more towards the front of the room thru panning. If you've got a bunch of out of phase material you'll get a lot of action in the rears.

cheers
geo

[mr.armadillo]

Thanks! I'll try that.