Bounces sound different than session. Please help!

A few thoughts...

If you're planning to commercialize your music, surround sound is going to be a very hard format to sell (unless you're working on a movie project). I too am a fan of surround, but pretty much gave it up years ago as the disc burning options were iffy, and it really costs a lot more in monitors (assuming you're using reasonable monitors).

How are you listening back to the surround files - just loading them back into Logic?

I'm guessing you do check the 'Surround Bounce' box (when doing a CMD+B)... do you have the file extensions and channels all setup properly in PREFERENCES-AUDIO-I/O ASSIGNMENTS?

Unless you're working on a movie project that will later be rendered in surround, yes you should abandon it.

That said, if you're doing it for your own amusement, then storm forward. Burning 5.1 to DVD is an expensive proposition - if you want to do it, the plugin (which may only work for Adobe Premier Pro) is about $295.

To further clarify - to work in surround, you need more than two speakers, usually six, two front left and right, two rear left and right, one center and one subwoofer. And an interface with as many outputs to feed these speakers. Then you can place and pan audio sources inside this field. The mastering mixbus needs as many channels, the distribution format (physical or digital) needs as many channels and the music listener needs as many channels, complete with properly positioned loudspeakers. This realistically leaves very few options to get your music heard as it was intended.

Sorry, but nope again. You'll need to re-pan all of your instruments (and likely re-mix them) to work in a stereo world.

The other approach would effectively be audio chaos.

Informative reply!

However in general content this board is starting to remind me of the old Steinberg email lists.