I thought your comment was unnecessarily downvoted, but I also don't think you provide much information. A dummy head recording has the downside that it's no l

I thought your comment was unnecessarily downvoted, but I also don't think you provide much information. A dummy head recording has the downside that it's no longer fully suitable for playback over anything besides headphones. Also, it is dependent on the HRTF of the dummy matching that of the listener. I'm not sure Ambisonics [1] would work for 5.1 sound. In most cases, 5.1 isn't produced by mic'ing in the directions of the ideal 5.1 speaker placement (at least for movies and music, I don't know anything about 5.1 production for video games). Typically, the L and R channels are used for directional sound, the C is used for dialog and other things that might be corrupted by panning, and the surround and bass channels are used for (weakly directional) ambient sound. So trying to 3-D pan the surround channels will probably just muddle the effect. Really, the best thing would be to actually record or synthesize in the Ambisonic format, and resynthesizing based on the playback setup. But a 5.1 recording, even one created with a 5.1 rig, is poorly suited for this. [1] For those who aren't aware, Ambisonics is a a format for storage of 3-D recordings, independent of the mic and speaker placements at the time of recording and playback. If the mic positions are known, you can project the raw recorded signals from multiple mics onto a neutral format. Likewise, if the speaker positions are known at playback time, the neutral format can be projected onto the proper signals for the playback setup to best simulate the recorded soundfield. Ideally, the recording and playback setups are optimized to capture the full 3-D soundfield.