Major movie houses, theatres, home entertainment environments, gaming, arcade and other public and in-house presentation areas today use surround sound systems for enhanced audio entertainment. Surround sound is basically when you increase the dimension of your sound (or sound waves), sort of like on the Twilight Zone. In other words you take the standard one dimensional audio production, referred to as mono / Left-Right, and turn it into multiple dimensions; two or three.
Sound Systems
To create surround sound, you can go any one of several different directions. The simplest and probably the oldest way, would be to set up a bunch of speakers surrounding the audience, so that the sound comes in to the listeners from all over, from the different directions.
A different method is to combine the use of headphones with localized audio production with psychoacoustics. The result is a simulated three-dimensional effect.
And another way to create surround sound is with ambisonics where you reconstruct the sound at a central point. However, you get a gradual decline in quality as you move outward.
Still another way is to use wave field synthesis...