The book gives an extensive up-to-date survey of more than 30 surround- and 20 stereo-microphone techniques and also - for the first time - offers an answer to the question of why the RCA "Living Stereo" series of legacy recordings from the 1950s and 60s is being appreciated by music lovers worldwide despite their use of a seemingly 'wrong' recording technique in sound-engineering/ psychoacoustic terms. In doing so it draws upon knowledge gained through the studying of concert hall acoustics and psychoacoustics. The sonic "fingerprint" characteristics of a selected number of surround as well as the most important stereo mic-techniques has been analyzed in great detail by measuring their signal cross-correlation over frequency. In addition to these acoustic measurements, the mic techniques are rated through an assessment of various acoustic attributes, combining the results of several subjective listening tests conducted also by other researchers. From this, conclusions on important mic system characteristics from Stereo to “3D-Audio” are drawn. As a result, new microphone techniques like AB-PC, ORTF-T and BPT, as well as the newly defined BQIrep – “Binaural Quality Index of reproduced music” are proposed.