it's a surround sound microphone for under $100, shipped from b&h.

you can watch a video that will play back in surround sound, if your computer/av receiver is capable of doing dolby decoding, and you have 5.1 speakers hooked up.

can you hear the surround sound on your system?

Vive Surround Sound Microphone Review

I have two of them. Actually I have a Cascade and a Vive (they are the same).
In a nutshell, I love them dearly. Freq response below 200hz is near non existant, but hey, the rest of it is good.
The Vive isn't a 5.1 mic. It sounds great played through Dolby Pro IIx;
The mic has three eletret mic elements in it- two in the front, one in the back. It is really like the old dolby surround setup (left front+right front+ rear ). The rear channel is matrixed into the two channels.
How does it sound? Pretty good. Played through DDIIX, you get a good amount of discrete sounding stuff. My favorite was a day at Cozumel. I put the camera on a tripod and just the thing record. I could hear my kids out of the front speakers, in the rear, I heard some people behind us talking real estate!
Another nice feature is that when I film and talk, on playback, my voice comes through loud and clear from the rear of the room.
All in all, it is great piece of equipment to have around. I use it all the time.

i think that i saw some of your old posts on the vive, on other forums(?), when i was looking to buy the mic.

the fact that it doesn't do real dolby surround encoding is perhaps a plus, because the panning info that's embedded into the audio survives all kinds of editing and re-encoding.

That is a plus.... or a minus depending on how you look at it. You can't edit the rear track and then remix. With Dolby Digital you can. You also have to be very careful doing any phase adjustments on the stereo track with Pro logic other wise you WILL disturb the rear track.

good points all... i really wished that there were seperate tracks for all channels, like a real surround sound mic has.

i looked hard at those holophone mics, because they do that, but the pricing was obscene, if you wanted to add another mic for the front channel.

I completely agree. I seriously looked at vive... it DOES sound good. But it's simply no good for my purposes if it can't be edited.

The Vive mics don't record the bass really well compared to some built-in mics and other external stereo mics like Audio-Technica's ATR25. It was my only disappointment, otherwise, it records surround sound pretty well. I used it on my Sony FX1; however, I also own a Sony SR11 which is an AVCHD camcorder with discrete surround recording; so I have a hard time preferring the better low light quality of the FX1 with the Vive and the higher resolution (in good light) with discrete surround and better sound quality of the SR11. If using the Vive, be prepared to fix the bass response in post.

The Vive does not dolby encode, but it does. Confused? Dolby Surround is a trademarked process of taking three channels and matrixing it into two. In other words, that rear channel is mixed into the stereo channels, then is extracted on playback with a surround sound decoder.
The VIVE does not claim to have dolby decoding because, well, then they'd have to pay a few bucks to Mr. Dolby's company! But, it does the same thing.
Next, there is no four channel surround in analog. Back in the early 90's (I don't remember when) Dolby introduced prologic. All this does is create a center channel from material shared by the left and right channels- it is 'steered' to the middle. Thus, we get four channels from three channel Dolby that came across a stereo source.
Can the level of rear be changed in editing? Yes, I think so! A few years ago, I played with an editing program (I forgot which) that claimed to to "create" a surround sound channel and let you adjust the level. I ran some SSM (old VIVE Mic) material and it seemed to extract the rear channel and I was able to change the level and even futz with equalization.
If you don't like surround, hey, don't decode it. But, it is always there if you want, plus has good seperation. Sound quality is way better than any cam's buil in mic. Nice highs, lows are not too good, but nothing is perfect, eh? Everytime I am on a cruise and record a ship blowing the horn, it is glaring. I was in Costa Rica and panama last month and it does a great job of picking up the sounds of the rain forest. In living room, I can watch the HDV footage and the sounds make me feel like I am there. Overall, it is a bargain and if you don't have one, you are missing out on the sonic part of the picture.

this is untrue. You in fact CAN encode four channels in prologic.

There are 2 types of prologic... the original (which is what you talk about) and then prologic II which accurately reproduces 4 tracks.

Yes you can decode prologic but you have to decode it through hardware. At present there is no software decoding ability.

And yes... the vive does have an ENcoder. I'm not sure why you're talking about a DEcoder... am I missing something here?

EDIT:
I should also mention that they already pay Dolby... they have no choice. They're using (and advertising) Dolby technology. You can't do that without paying for the right.