Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)

[etienne deleflie]

>
>
>  4. More composers are starting to look at ambisonics though there is
>> still some resistance to it , mainly I think because its hard to get
>> your head around. I'm still trying to work out why stereo diffusion
>> into multiple speakers is more popular to many composers than
>> ambisonics and multichannel mixing
>>
>
> that is a phenomenon i haven't been able to figure out either :)
> why do people still fall for the BEAST?
>

very simple explanation ... diffusion exploits the acoustic of the
performance space. Ambisonics and other similar approaches *challenge* the
acoustic of the performance space.

Dennis Smalley (interview with Austin 2000) describes diffusion as ... ‘the
“sonorising” of the acoustic space’.

In other words ... the acoustic/performance space acts like an instrument
... you *play* it.  With ambisonics you have to overcome/neutralise the
acoustics of the performance space.

Etienne
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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

On 04/03/2012 03:16 PM, Augustine Leudar wrote:


4. More composers are starting to look at ambisonics though there is
still some resistance to it , mainly I think because its hard to get
your head around. I'm still trying to work out why stereo diffusion
into multiple speakers is more popular to many composers than
ambisonics and multichannel mixing


that is a phenomenon i haven't been able to figure out either :)
why do people still fall for the BEAST?

jörn (with apologies to the birmingham crew ;)

--
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487

Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)
Tonmeister VDT

http://stackingdwarves.net

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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[David Pickett]

At 14:01 02/04/2012, Aaron Heller wrote:

> I put some files at
>
>   http://ambisonics.dreamhosters.com/DTS/

I downloaded, cut onto CD and listened to the finale of Brahms I, 
which I have conducted several times (where was this recorded?). It 
is the first time I have heard 4.0 from a CD and for some reason it 
took me a long time to establish a volume level. The wide dynamic 
range is nice. The instrumental timbres are realistic, and it is 
terrific to hear the applause from all around -- something that one 
unfortunately doesnt get with the DVD recordings of the Sylvester 
concert from the Musikverein. The image seemed stable. The worst 
aspect was the "distortion" (most noticeable just after Letter N from 
12:10), which I take to be the 16-bit granularity. I will listen to 
more of these.


Thanks!

David

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 4 Apr 2012, at 01:13, Sampo Syreeni  wrote:

> Eric, could you tell us a little bit about the patent status of the CAF 
> implementation within libsndfile? And while we're at it, what would be tha 
> chance of getting some newer, purely open source format into the library, if 
> coded by an outside agency? Just in case?

CAF is purely open source, it's 64-bit, it's extensible, it's taggable, and it 
has provisions such that if your CAF-writing program (e.g. DAW) crashes, you 
still have a valid/recoverable file until the point in time when the program 
crashes (which is not the case with most other file formats).

So why create more file formats, we have already too many. If not CAF, then use 
an MP4 container format, just not yet another format, we've got plenty crappy 
ones already. Rather use something that has already existing infrastructure.

>> If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just present 
>> subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not notice at all, any 
>> more than they do in the concert hall or rock venue, I suspect its 
>> commercial appeal will be negligible.
> 
> Have you ever heard what pantophonic ambisonic, decoded from two channels to 
> four speakers, can do? Eero Aro was once kind enough to show me that, and it 
> was downright eerie. Even as the very, very limited BHJ version. The setup 
> was nowhere near perfect, the playback came from analog tape, and so on... 
> Yet stuff seemed to come from the sides and behind me. It stayed there as 
> well, when I turned my head.

Exactly my point, that's why I'm pissed when the n-th order snobism kills 
everything from UHJ to G-Format to planar-only B-format.
I wished anything beyond that would, for at leas the next decade be clearly 
marked "academic research only", and stay out of the way when it comes to 
practical applications (except when used as an internal intermediate format 
within processing modules).

There's a good chance that within the next year or two, Amazon and Apple will 
start selling lossless encoded audio. In Stereo. That means UHJ will be an 
option. So there. UHJ is all we need, it's good enough for a start. Once people 
know UHJ, then you can tell them that using a third channel to get to 
horizontal-only B-format it gets even better. Once that's established in the 
mainstream you can start talking about Z-axis and higher orders. Not before. 
Step-by-step.

All commercially relevant music is sold essentially stereo only. That means the 
only thing that's relevant for the near and mid-term is UJH, with binaural and 
5.1 (4.0) decoding. Plus maybe 5.1 G-Format for music videos on DVD or surround 
capable video downloads. Period.

> Of course it wouldn't have. The difference is that now every piece of real 
> audio hardware has a signal processor inside it. Now, every piece of hardware 
> *and* software can easily, effortlessly and cheaply adapt to the ambisonic 
> viewpoint. First order, it's no more than 20-30 lines of code.
> 
> So why *not* do it, since it's really, really good even on the minimum four 
> speakers?
> 
> We can do both of those better than the folks who do them now, discretely. I 
> can promise you that even at first order. No kidding either. :)
> 
> Why don't the commercial manufacturers do what the early ambisonic decoder 
> makers did, and limit the choices to just two: aspect ratio of the 
> (rectangular) rig, and its mean diameter? I mean, it works spectacularly well 
> regardless of the number of speakers, it's intuitive, and it can be easily 
> generalized to non-ambisonic modes of playback as well.
> 
> This ain't rocket surgery, you know.

That's the realistic attitude I'm missing for the most part around here

>> So there is absolutely no danger at all of Apple "locking in" B-Format as it 
>> is all but un-lockable.
> 
> Not much, but there is some: if theirs is the only widely spread format which 
> carries B-format, and its ancillary online features are held behind a patent 
> wall, then de facto B-format's only viable distribution channel could be 
> owned by Apple. That'd be a real shame.

Not really. Compare to what we have now. Imagine a hypothetical Apple patent 
wall that gets Ambisonic B-Format limited to the iTunes music store. That's 
hundreds of millions of users!
And what do we have now? A few thousands of enthusiasts and academics.
I eat the patent pill to get the tech spread and the content creators on board. 
The patents expire in less time than has already been wasted and resulted in 
Ambisonics going nowhere.

> Thus, where is our open sourced hardware for ambisonic? We used to have 
> something like that in the analogue age. Where is the counterpart of that for 
> the DSP age? :)


The problem is: who still needs hardware? Unless it's incorporated into 
something like an Oppo DVD/BD player, which hooks up directly to a power amp, 
the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV that gets its data stream 
from a computer se

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Richard Dobson]

On 04/04/2012 00:54, Marc Lavallée wrote:


The CAF format is not patented, but there are patented file formats
like GIF, ASF or PDF.



Ah yes, I suppose those are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The general issue arises when a file format pretends to be a container 
format but in fact specifically enshrines patented DRM, compression or 
other encryption algorithms (e.g GIF because of LZW compression, loads 
of such things in the monster that was/is ASF). PDF (having moved 
through a rather large number of versions) is now effectively free and 
open (now an ISO standard), available on Linux etc.


Richard Dobson

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Richard Dobson]

On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
..


So why *not* do it, since it's really, really good even on the minimum
four speakers?



Good question. The answer is always given that first order is "not good 
enough". The perfect really is the enemy of the good, or the better. You 
could call it "order creep".


..



Unless of course they publish a file format for it


Want a minimal and purposely highly (even overtly) extensible one? That
I can design. In fact I've meant to do something like this from teenage
up. :)


Please do!

My one (ho ho) mistake with AMB (published 2000) was that is it not 
extensible (I asked on this list, repeatedly, for what people needed, no 
response at all); only supports up to third-order. I naively thought 
that would be enough. I kept it a bit too simple by not adding a version 
field.  And of course for HOA with 24/96 etc it needs a 64bit file 
format (such as CAF) anyway. Somewhere, people have been (apparently) 
designing the ultimate handle-everything file format (maybe even using 
CAF), but as far as I am aware it has not been finalised and published 
as a formal spec. There was talk of using FLAC, ogg, etc. Everyone 
argued incessantly about channel naming (people are fed up with WXYZUV 
etc), ordering, normalization regimes (e.g. getting rid of the 
traditional 3db scaling on W), embedding decoding coefficients (or was 
it encoding?)  inside the header, all manner of stuff. So I have to wish 
you good luck...


Richard Dobson

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Marc Lavallée]

The CAF format is not patented, but there are patented file formats
like GIF, ASF or PDF.

Richard Dobson  a écrit:

> On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
> > On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote:
> >
> >> Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have
> >> defined channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it
> >> possible to create a 1st-order CAF file.
> >
> > Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first
> > order, they will have run out by now.
> >
> >> CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented.
> >
> > On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related
> > software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new.
> > Most of the technology could be challenged because it's a
> > derivative of EA IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even
> > EBU's 64-bit WAV derivative is part of the open, prior art).
> >
> 
> 
> ?? what patents? You are tilting at windmills. CAF is a file format 
> (more precisely a container format), a standard to be followed, not a 
> device (much less an algorithm) that can be patented.  Did you think 
> WAVE was somehow patented? Or XML for that matter? OK, if you put 
> something such as an mp3 stream inside a file, then technically you
> need a licence to encode/decode it; but there can be no patent
> attached to a file format per se.
> 
> See here for all you need to know about CAF (including how to
> implement it on other platforms). And note it is extensible in just
> the same way WAVEX is:
> 
> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAF_intro/CAF_intro.html
> 
> You can download it as a pdf. You will find no reference to a patent 
> anywhere.
> 
> Richard Dobson
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[David Pickett]

At 08:49 03/04/2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:

>Frankly, I have ZERO interest in 2nd and higher-order Ambisonics,
>because anything beyond a 5.1/4.0 setup is impractical in any home
>listening environment for 90%+ of consumers, particularly if the
>speakers and amps are supposed to be of a quality that provide for the
>homogenous sound field that Ambisonics asks for. An 8.1 home setup
>with 6 cheesy cardboard surround effects speakers and two decent
>stereo front speakers isn't going to be enjoyable, and four nice
>speakers already cost more than most people can afford.

I have to agree with this.  I have five smallish but decent B & W 
speakers (4 off DM603-S3 and the equivalent center unit) and that 
cost $2,500, which seems to me to be enough.  Add the cost of a 
decent multichannel power amplifier and DVD/SACD player and that's 
another $1,500.  Stitching it all together I use an RME FF800, which 
is admittedly slight overkill, but it allows me to play wav files 
from a laptop in surround.  Total investment for what I regard as a 
fairly modest home system is over $6,000.  Not peanuts, even today!


David

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Richard Dobson]

On 04/04/2012 00:13, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote:


Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined
channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to
create a 1st-order CAF file.


Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first
order, they will have run out by now.


CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented.


On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related
software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new. Most
of the technology could be challenged because it's a derivative of EA
IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even EBU's 64-bit WAV
derivative is part of the open, prior art).




?? what patents? You are tilting at windmills. CAF is a file format 
(more precisely a container format), a standard to be followed, not a 
device (much less an algorithm) that can be patented.  Did you think 
WAVE was somehow patented? Or XML for that matter? OK, if you put 
something such as an mp3 stream inside a file, then technically you need 
a licence to encode/decode it; but there can be no patent attached to a 
file format per se.


See here for all you need to know about CAF (including how to implement 
it on other platforms). And note it is extensible in just the same way 
WAVEX is:


https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAF_intro/CAF_intro.html

You can download it as a pdf. You will find no reference to a patent 
anywhere.


Richard Dobson
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2012-04-03, Richard Dobson wrote:

Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined 
channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to 
create a 1st-order CAF file.


Agreed. And whatever ambisonic related patents there are for first 
order, they will have run out by now.



CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open and documented.


On the other hand, Apple hasn't placed any of its coding related 
software patents into the open domain, here, and CAF is rather new. Most 
of the technology could be challenged because it's a derivative of EA 
IFF and then Microsoft RIFF (WAV) derived (even EBU's 64-bit WAV 
derivative is part of the open, prior art).


But at the same time, Apple put in some streaming related indexing into 
CAF which is new and not as easily contested. As a pirate and someone 
who criticises those kinds of patents, I don't think they should have 
been granted. But at the same tiem, I know they have *been* granted, and 
I know they are likely to stick even if challenged. (The relevant parts 
are the ones which hint a real time media server about how to deliver 
RTP-streams. If you filter them out, you're probably safe until Apple 
decides to sue you on the trivialities and proven art which should have 
been safe already.)



It is supported in libsndfile (along with AMB), among other things.


I haven't been following Eric's work as closely as I should have been. 
Of the two lists I'm on, he's mostly spoken on musicdsp, and not here.


Eric, could you tell us a little bit about the patent status of the CAF 
implementation within libsndfile? And while we're at it, what would be 
tha chance of getting some newer, purely open source format into the 
library, if coded by an outside agency? Just in case?


There is no indication they have any interest in providing an in-house 
codec for B-Format - which would nevertheless be a strong way to 
establish it in the "mainstream'.


As usual, I can't be relied upon for anything. But I've narrowed down a 
certain spherical harmonics toolset as something which could be utilized 
for further ambisonic work, without worrying about the order, 
library-wise. It comes with a numerical stability proof right upto order 
2800, which is to say "quite enough". Unfortunately it's written in 
Fortran, but then it compiles with GCC, using portable libraries like 
FFTW, LAPACK and BLAS, which we'd need in any case.


If I ever get around to finishing the Motherlode, I'm thinking SHTools ( 
http://shtools.ipgp.fr/ ) and some example code against it would be a 
terrific addition in the practical, computational front. I mean, 
obviously having all of the knowledge isn't enough to spread ambisonic 
around. We do need open API's, libraries, idiot-libraries and all that.


"If you want people to adopt it, you must first make it idiot-proof."

Those who want Ambisonics to become more widely established (aka 
"mainstream") will need to talk to those who want it to remain a niche 
process for the cognoscenti.


The latter part is zilch. None of us who have learnt what the technology 
is about wants it to remain on the sidelines. Sure, it's nice to talk 
about it within a little circuit, but none of us, and I repeat *none*, 
want to have to cobble up ad hoc circuits to listen to the sound, none 
of us have ever purposefully hindered its mainstream adoption, and then 
*all* of us really just wonder, why-didn't-it-or-how-to-make-it catch 
fire for real.


No kidding. Ask anybody on-list. While some patent hassles do remain, 
those have *never* been about overt exploitation of the basic 
technology. They, too, even as I hate the thing, have been about making 
a living while developing and promoting the system further.


(Mind you, in my time on the list, I've never *ever* met as many helpful 
and altruistic folks as here. Even with the development of the first 
stages of the Motherlode. A number of folks have gone to the length of 
scanning countless boxes of carefully preserved physical documents. That 
sort of sustained effort doesn't come from profit-mindedness, but from 
pure love of the elegance of the sound architecture.)


To do the former will by definition require some company or other to 
support it and present some de-facto standard implementation.


Today, it might or it might not require that. Nowadays there is the open 
source circuit as well, you know. It isn't only about a limited number 
of companies or bureaucratically shelved out government subsidies -- 
like the National Research and Development Council quango which already 
burnt the tech once. Now we have other options besides.


If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers will just 
present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might not 
notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock 
venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible.


Have you ever heard what pantophonic ambisonic, decoded from two 
channels to fou

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 22:15, Richard Dobson  wrote:

> The Apple lossless codec was made open-source last year.


Some people might as: why was it not published earlier?

To that I'd answer:

- legal issues: a company like Apple has huge potential legal liabilities. 
Before they release something like that into the wild, they make sure there are 
no relevant patents or other legal issues that could result in massive 
liabilities for publishing the code

- engineering issues: Apple will not publish code they don't deem sufficiently 
mature and well documented. Sometimes release cycles mandate less than perfect 
code to get things out the door. You're just not going to publish lousy, quick 
& dirty code. You clean it up, document it, and when it's stable and reasonably 
bug free, that's the point when you can publish it.

- demand: putting something out there requires a minimum amount of effort, 
support and infrastructure. There's no point in publishing code and incurring 
all that overhead if there's no demand.

Only if there are enough requests for something to be public, there are no 
legal obstacles, the code is mature enough, and it's not considered a 
proprietary key competitive advantage over other platforms, things can and will 
be published.

Anyway, we're not here to discuss Apple. I only mentioned Apple because in the 
past there was once a small chance that they might have picked it up, but it 
was largely ruined by the purists demands which sent the people from Apple who 
were lurking on this list to assess the potential running away. Not likely that 
they'll come back anytime soon...

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:26, Rev Tony Newnham  
wrote:

> What about "Apple lossless compression", Quicktime - and so on?
> 
>> Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM.

Apple Lossless is fully published: 

http://alac.macosforge.org/

It's reason to exist is that Apple made an engineering choice: that less 
compute cycles during playback (i.e. battery life on portable devices) is more 
important than fast compression (which is done only once) or the ultimate in 
compression ratio (storage gets cheaper, but devices and batteries shrink, so 
battery life is always going to be a challenge).

Again, it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. As a matter 
of fact, when it comes to standards Apple does more to push them than just 
about any other force in the market. Others push things like Flash, 


> Quicktime

Quicktime was way ahead of its time and actually is the foundation of MPEG4, 
which has a container format directly based on Quicktime. With the arrival of 
MP4 Apple pretty much only uses that format, and retains the older versions 
only for backwards compatibility. All the stuff you find in the iTunes store 
are now MP4 based, i.e. m4v and m4a, whereby only the DRM is proprietary at the 
request of the content providers. The container format itself is open and 
anyone can create and read m4v/m4a files as long as they don't try to use the 
FairPlay DRM, which is kind of obvious, because if everyone could decode the 
DRM, there wouldn't be a need for DRM in the first place.

> and so on?

Can't answer that part of the question, because it's not specified in any 
meaningful way.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Blumlein versus ORTF

[Robert Greene]

Thanks everybody for the links and in particular the
calculation of models link. I shall work on that one
I know the Lipshitz paper well, but it seems that
experts disagree. James Johnston has told me
a number of times for example that he thinks
getting those time cues from ORTF is really
important and that pure Blumlein is really
not the way to go because they are missing.

So... in this corner expert 1, Stanley L and
in the opposite corner expert 
2 ,JJ. What's a body to do?


Thanks again
Robert
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Richard Dobson]

The Apple lossless codec was made open-source last year.

Richard Dobson


On 03/04/2012 20:26, Rev Tony Newnham wrote:

Hi

What about "Apple lossless compression", Quicktime - and so on?

Tony


-Original Message-
From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu]

On

Behalf Of Ronald C.F. Antony
Sent: 03 April 2012 20:06
To: Surround Sound discussion group
Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music


Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM.



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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Richard Dobson]

Well, we don't need to get hyper-paranoid about it. Apple have defined 
channel IDs for WXYZ, which goes no further than make it possible to 
create a 1st-order CAF file. CAF is not closed, the spec is fully open 
and documented. It is supported in libsndfile (along with AMB), among 
other things. I might even add it to the CDP m/c toolkit, if anyone is 
still actually using it. There is no indication they have any  interest 
in providing an in-house codec for B-Format - which would nevertheless 
be a strong way to establish it in the "mainstream'.


Those who want Ambisonics to become more widely established (aka 
"mainstream") will need to talk to those who want it to remain a niche 
process for the cognoscenti. To do the former will by definition require 
some company or other to support it and present some de-facto standard 
implementation. If it is pitched on the basis that most of the speakers 
will just present subtle degree of ambience, which many listeners might 
not notice at all, any more than they do in the concert hall or rock 
venue, I suspect its commercial appeal will be negligible.


I suspect that if Dolby et al, rather than define a single 5.1 surround 
format, had proposed umpteen options, arbitrary speaker positions, 
multiple user options for encoding and decoding, etc, the format would 
very likely not have been taken up at all. Sometimes choice is a good 
thing, but sometimes it is not. Every decision an implementer has to 
take, every option they have either to adopt or disregard, will reduce 
their enthusiasm for the thing by 50%, progressively. 5.1 is a shoo-in 
as there is just the one thing to implement, which everyone will use. 
Even 7.1 is a problem as there are a whopping two alternative layouts 
around.


B-format has so many options and permutations available that the 
commercial enthusiasm factor will be down to 0.1% or less. So there is 
absolutely no danger at all of Apple "locking in" B-Format as it is all 
but un-lockable.  That jelly+tree thing again.


What you might get, on the other hand, is a hardware-based turnkey 
system aimed at a very specific market, such as IOSONO or Immsound, 
where they tell you only the absolute minimum information required to 
run the system, and it is probably closed beyond the possibility of 
opening.


Unless of course they publish a file format for it

Richard Dobson


On 03/04/2012 19:14, Robert Greene wrote:


I agree. My appeal for material to listen to
was not intended as a call to get Apple to take
over. The blood curdles.
Robert

On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Marc Lavall?e wrote:



I would fear an "applelization" of ambisonics. Apple could impose its
own "ok" format (probably as a CAF "chunk" specification) with patents
and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not
everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my
opinion).


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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Rev Tony Newnham]

Hi

What about "Apple lossless compression", Quicktime - and so on?

Tony

> -Original Message-
> From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu]
On
> Behalf Of Ronald C.F. Antony
> Sent: 03 April 2012 20:06
> To: Surround Sound discussion group
> Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music
> 
> 
> Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM.


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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 18:03, Marc Lavallée  wrote:

> I would fear an "applelization" of ambisonics. Apple could impose its
> own "ok" format (probably as a CAF "chunk" specification) with patents
> and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not
> everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my
> opinion).

I think that's baseless FUD.

Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM.
So of course, some multi-channel Ambisonic music for sale in the iTunes Store 
would likely be in some sort of m4a container with some proprietary purchase 
information chunk, but what do you expect?

On the other hand, DRM free formats Apple has a long history of publishing and 
making available.
Apple focuses on where its PRODUCTS have a competitive advantage, and for THOSE 
THINGS patents the shit out of everything.

Underlying mainstream technologies, however, anything from HTML5, networking, 
the CoreOS, etc. are all based on open standards, published, and often even 
open source.
I see no reason why that would be different with Ambisonic audio.

Besides, I really don't care. Right now, the price of admission for a 
non-tinker setup is north of $40k for a Meridian setup. Comparatively speaking, 
I don't care if I'm "forced" to buy an AppleTV for $99 or an iPad or MacMini 
for $500 as price of admission.

There are plenty of patents already in the Ambisonic field, a few more won't 
hurt, and if a giant like Apple were to enter this market, chances are, they 
would be able (due to the volume of licensing), to coax the rest of the patent 
holders to throw all the patents into a pool, like was done for H.264, and 
license them under FRAND terms as standard essential patents. Everyone would 
win.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Robert Greene]

I agree. My appeal for material to listen to
was not intended as a call to get Apple to take
over. The blood curdles.
Robert

On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Marc Lavall?e wrote:



I would fear an "applelization" of ambisonics. Apple could impose its
own "ok" format (probably as a CAF "chunk" specification) with patents
and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not
everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my
opinion).

"Ronald C.F. Antony"  a ?crit :



On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote:

> Ronald:
> 
>> Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but 
>> adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like 
>> that would make a difference.
> 
> Very interesting!  Does iTunes currently support multi-channel

> audio (other than on purchased movies)?
> 
> As best I can tell, they do not.  Why would they in the future?


No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm
not sure what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel
layout is dropped into iTunes and the default core-audio device
happens to be a multi-channel audio interface.

However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple
products. e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb,
core-audio supports multi-channel and has a standard surround panner
that uses Ambisonic theory to achieve its task, etc.

CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc.

In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing
floating around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and
application universe that if the right people were convinced, it
would not be a massive undertaking to get the basics going, i.e.
something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order Horizontal-only-B-Format
playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. It's something
that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical product
cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it,
and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might
enquire they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order
isn't good enough and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them.

After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know,
and that causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch
that what they do isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the
equivalent of kicking the hornets nest, because they potentially
confuse the average user, and then they get bad press on top, when
anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple and they
find plenty of people bitching about the "crappy, insufficient
implementation".

The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because
they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is
the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for
higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure.
Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a
result they are getting nothing ever.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Robert Greene]

, please notify the sender and delete this email. Please
direct any  concerns to  info...@derby.ac.uk.
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Re: [Sursound] POA/HOA vs 5.1

[Trond Lossius]

On Apr 1, 2012, at 9:51 PM, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

> On 04/01/2012 09:05 PM, Augustine Leudar wrote:
>> again to anyone who says things like "ambisonics cant compete with 5.1
>> please bear in mind this is like saying "amplitude panning can't
>> compete with 5.1 - it doesnt make any sense at all. You mix your
>> tracks horizontally ,without elevation, using ambisonics plugins and
>> burn your ac3/dts file like any other surround mix.
> 
> higher order ambisonics can compete. first order cannot.

Using a matrix-based decoding, I would agree with you about first order, but my 
experience is that decoding using Harpex leads to quite convincing and robust 
results.

Cheers,
Trond
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Re: [Sursound] Quality recordings?

[Daniel Courville]

Le 12-04-03 07:00, Bo-Erik Sandholm a écrit :

>By the way do anyone have a VST plugin capabale of B-format to UHJ coding?

You haven't specified the OS, but, if it's Mac OS, there's my B2Stereo/UHJ
plug-in: the UHJ encoding uses Angelo Farina's B to UHJ impulse responses.




- Daniel


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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Marc Lavallée]

I would fear an "applelization" of ambisonics. Apple could impose its
own "ok" format (probably as a CAF "chunk" specification) with patents
and lock-ins, because it's a common practice in the audio industry. Not
everything in this world needs to be mainstream (but that's just my
opinion).

"Ronald C.F. Antony"  a écrit :

> 
> On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote:
> 
> > Ronald:
> > 
> >> Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but 
> >> adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like 
> >> that would make a difference.
> > 
> > Very interesting!  Does iTunes currently support multi-channel
> > audio (other than on purchased movies)?
> > 
> > As best I can tell, they do not.  Why would they in the future?
> 
> No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm
> not sure what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel
> layout is dropped into iTunes and the default core-audio device
> happens to be a multi-channel audio interface.
> 
> However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple
> products. e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb,
> core-audio supports multi-channel and has a standard surround panner
> that uses Ambisonic theory to achieve its task, etc.
> 
> CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc.
> 
> In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing
> floating around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and
> application universe that if the right people were convinced, it
> would not be a massive undertaking to get the basics going, i.e.
> something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order Horizontal-only-B-Format
> playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. It's something
> that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical product
> cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it,
> and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might
> enquire they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order
> isn't good enough and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them.
> 
> After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know,
> and that causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch
> that what they do isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the
> equivalent of kicking the hornets nest, because they potentially
> confuse the average user, and then they get bad press on top, when
> anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple and they
> find plenty of people bitching about the "crappy, insufficient
> implementation".
> 
> The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because
> they can't accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is
> the accepted standard, one can then incrementally push for
> higher-order extensions to an already existing infrastructure.
> Instead, they want it all, and they want it right now, and as a
> result they are getting nothing ever.
> 
> Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Newmedia]

nuous to say that it is not.
> How  many symphony concerts have you been to
> recently where the orchestra  surrounded the audience.
> The other way around, sure.
> But I  think this is just not true, that music
> with the musicians around the  audience is common.
> Not in the statistical sense of percentage  of
> concerts where it happens.
> Robert
>
> On Mon, 2  Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote:
>
>> Right on - as I've said  before, frontal  music is largely a development 
of
>> 16th  century Western civilisation and is not universal, even  now.
>>
>> By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in  St. Marks - there is at
>> least some evidence that separate choirs  singing antiphonally were _not
>> _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D.  "The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: 
Myth
>> and Reality" in Early Music  History, Cambridge 1981, p169).
>>
>>  Dave
>>
>>
>> On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul  Hodges wrote:
>>>
>>> --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700  Robert Greene 
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> Of course music exists that is  not in front. But the vast bulk of
>>>> concert music is  not like that.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sure; but what  proportion of music are we happy to be unable to 
reproduce
>>>  properly?  My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) 
was  a
>>> trivial example - and it's only in combination with other  things that 
it
>>> becomes spatially interesting, generally.  You mentioned Gabrieli and
>>> Berlioz in a slightly  dismissive manner; I would add to them people 
like
>>> Stockhausen  and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, 
a
>>>  hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other  from
>>> different parts of the hall.  Not all within the  restricted form of 
"concert
>>> music", but music in the real  world where we turn our heads and enjoy 
our
>>> whole  environment.
>>>
>>>  Paul
>>>
>>
>> --
>> These are my own  views and may or may not be shared by my employer
>>  /*/
>>  /* Dave Malham   http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/  */
>> /* Music Research Centre */
>> /* Department of  Music"http://music.york.ac.uk/";  */
>> /* The University of York  Phone 01904 322448*/
>> /* Heslington  Fax   01904 322450*/
>>  /* York YO10 5DD   */
>> /* UK'Ambisonics -  Component Imaging for Audio'   */
>> /* "http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/"; */
>>  /*/
>>
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--  

These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my  employer

Dave Malham
Music Research Centre
Department of  Music
The University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK
Phone  01904 322448
Fax 01904 322450
'Ambisonics - Component  Imaging for  Audio'
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:52, newme...@aol.com wrote:

> Ronald:
> 
>> Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but 
>> adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like 
>> that would make a difference.
> 
> Very interesting!  Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio  
> (other than on purchased movies)?
> 
> As best I can tell, they do not.  Why would they in the future?

No, currently I don't think it's officially supported, although I'm not sure 
what happens if some standard audio file with multi-channel layout is dropped 
into iTunes and the default core-audio device happens to be a multi-channel 
audio interface.

However, there are enough of the basics in Mac OS X and related Apple products. 
e.g. Logic has B-format IR files for surround reverb, core-audio supports 
multi-channel and has a standard surround panner that uses Ambisonic theory to 
achieve its task, etc.

CAF is both an open file format, future proof and extensible, etc.

In short: there are enough of the ingredients and core audio plumbing floating 
around without 3rd party solutions in Apples OS X and application universe that 
if the right people were convinced, it would not be a massive undertaking to 
get the basics going, i.e. something like UHJ, G-Format and 1st order 
Horizontal-only-B-Format playback in iTunes/QuickTime and production in Logic. 
It's something that could easily be done within one or two of Apples typical 
product cycles, BUT they first would have been convinced that it's worth it, 
and that isn't ever going to happen as long as any time someone might enquire 
they are going to hear an earful from purists that 1st order isn't good enough 
and that anything below 3rd-order is beneath them.

After all, why would Apple do something that most people don't know, and that 
causes the natural proponents of the system to just bitch that what they do 
isn't good enough? For Apple that is just the equivalent of kicking the hornets 
nest, because they potentially confuse the average user, and then they get bad 
press on top, when anti-Apple circles start looking for material to smear Apple 
and they find plenty of people bitching about the "crappy, insufficient 
implementation".

The Ambisonic community keeps shooting itself in the foot, because they can't 
accept that OK is better than nothing, and that once OK is the accepted 
standard, one can then incrementally push for higher-order extensions to an 
already existing infrastructure. Instead, they want it all, and they want it 
right now, and as a result they are getting nothing ever.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Newmedia]

Ronald:
 
> Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but 
> adoption by Apple's iTunes Store, or something like 
> that would make a difference.
 
Very interesting!  Does iTunes currently support multi-channel audio  
(other than on purchased movies)?
 
As best I can tell, they do not.  Why would they in the future?
 
Mark Stahlman
Brooklyn NY
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Peter Lennox]

I've always assumed that frontal, proscenium arch -type presentations came out 
of the logistics of clocking large numbers of musicians together - generally 
using a visual cue in the form of a conductor (also, individual musicians might 
feel a bit lonely if they can't hang out with their mates) - and this in turn 
helped reify the distinction between the music makers and the music listeners.
In other musical forms (music to have your dinner by, Telemann, lounge music, 
ambient, scallywags employed to amuse the medieval court , up there in the 
minstrels gallery, modern club music, wedding party celebration music, 
religious music [various cultures] etc etc) 'front' would have less, if any, 
relevance.
So, if that's right, stereo is predicated on quite a specialised musical 
presentation.

So, then, saying 'stereo is all you need' is a bit like saying 'you don't need 
4 wheel drive' - true, but in circumscribed circumstances.

Dr Peter Lennox
School of Technology 
University of Derby, UK
tel: 01332 593155
e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk  


-Original Message-
From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On 
Behalf Of Dave Malham
Sent: 03 April 2012 09:49
To: Surround Sound discussion group
Subject: Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

Hi Robert,
   Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the
16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new
concept. On the other hand,when talking about  "acoustic _concert_
music", it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented,
because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the
same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched
that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from
an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves -
and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a
strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end
of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave
the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about
Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably
increasingly in it's home countries) Gamelan is usually presented
frontally (even we usually do that) but this is _not_ correct
traditionally.

Dave

On 2 April 2012 16:34, Robert Greene  wrote:
>
> It may be old but it is still all but universal
> in acoustic concert music.
> I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not.
> How many symphony concerts have you been to
> recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience.
> The other way around, sure.
> But I think this is just not true, that music
> with the musicians around the audience is common.
> Not in the statistical sense of percentage of
> concerts where it happens.
> Robert
>
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote:
>
>> Right on - as I've said before, frontal  music is largely a development of
>> 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now.
>>
>> By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at
>> least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not
>> _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. "The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth
>> and Reality" in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169).
>>
>>  Dave
>>
>>
>> On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote:
>>>
>>> --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 Of course music exists that is  not in front. But the vast bulk of
 concert music is not like that.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce
>>> properly?  My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a
>>> trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it
>>> becomes spatially interesting, generally.  You mentioned Gabrieli and
>>> Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like
>>> Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a
>>> hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from
>>> different parts of the hall.  Not all within the restricted form of "concert
>>> music", but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our
>>> whole environment.
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>
>> --
>> These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
>> /*/
>> /* Dave Malham   http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */
>> /* Music Research Centre                                             */
>> /* Department of Music    "http://music.york.ac.uk/";                 */
>> /* The University of York  Phone 01904 322448                        */
>> /* Heslington              Fax   01904 322450                        */
>> /* York YO10 5DD                                                     */
>> /* UK                   'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio'   */
>> /*                    "http://w

Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:21, "Michael Chapman"  wrote:

> Oh, but the labour of transporting >100 manequins in fur coats
> into the concert hall to get the acoustics right.
> Much better to hope the concert attracts the correct socio-
> economic class ( ... mink ... ) ... and the hall is cold enough
> that they keep them on.
> Mind you with anti-fur campaigns spreading to continental
> Europe we all may be finished soon ;-))>


Come on, some shaggy-rug seat covers sound just fine, available at every 
low-class auto parts store ;D

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)

[Michael Chapman]

> So I am nervously edging towards the following conclusions :
>
> 1. Music can be mixed ambisonically and then "decoded" or "bounced
> down" to Speaker configurations like 5.1, 7.1 ,1100.12 , stereo
> whatever.
>
Think it is generally agreed that feeding too many speakers
for the given 'prder' of ambisonics is not a good idea.

So more than six for first order would be deprecated ...

> 2. This can all be done with software - there is no need for
> specialist decoders or hardware -
Yes
> making it more a tool for mixing
> than a product that needs to be marketed to the public.
See other thread ;-)>

Michael


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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Michael Chapman]

>
> I understand that, which is why I made the snide remark about ticket
> sales. To place an microphone at audience level, one would have to empty
> enough seats around the mic position to make neighbors a non-issue. But
> revenues trump everything.
> Similarly, they could do a recording while doing final rehearsal, since
> there's no guarantee what ends up being the better performance anyway (and
> generally I could deal just fine without the disturbing applause in my
> living room, random coughing, and other stuff that comes with live events
> (like air conditioners kicking in because the collective body heat raised
> the temperatures too high, etc.)
>
Oh, but the labour of transporting >100 manequins in fur coats
into the concert hall to get the acoustics right.
Much better to hope the concert attracts the correct socio-
economic class ( ... mink ... ) ... and the hall is cold enough
that they keep them on.
Mind you with anti-fur campaigns spreading to continental
Europe we all may be finished soon ;-))>

Michael


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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 07:31, Jörn Nettingsmeier  
wrote:

> On 04/02/2012 06:33 PM, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
>> 
>> On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aro  wrote:
>> 
>>> Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point
>>> miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the
>>> orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good
>>> balance with one point miking.
>> 
>> Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT.
>> IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where 
>> people in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then 
>> that means there is a spot for single-point recording.
> 
>> If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone, 
>> recording methodology, or both.
> 
> a) putting a microphone into the audience is pretty much impossible for live 
> situations, unless you are more interested in the respiratory functions of 
> your seat neighbors than in the music. flying a soundfield high above makes 
> for a nice horizontal blend of the music, but gives irritating height 
> information.

I understand that, which is why I made the snide remark about ticket sales. To 
place an microphone at audience level, one would have to empty enough seats 
around the mic position to make neighbors a non-issue. But revenues trump 
everything.
Similarly, they could do a recording while doing final rehearsal, since there's 
no guarantee what ends up being the better performance anyway (and generally I 
could deal just fine without the disturbing applause in my living room, random 
coughing, and other stuff that comes with live events (like air conditioners 
kicking in because the collective body heat raised the temperatures too high, 
etc.)

> b) the listening room acoustics need to be factored into the equation. which 
> is why the usual approach is to get the microphones way high, and to record 
> in really large rooms - you are shifting the early reflections into a range 
> where they are not perceived as coloration, but as echoes. a "best seat in 
> the audience" kind of recording has its own set of coloring early reflections 
> already, and it is very sensitive to listening room influence. (i guess the 
> reason is our brain can sort out one set of ERs as "natural" and work around 
> the coloration, but not two sets.)

Personally, I have never thought that to be an issue with the recordings I did 
for friends. The microphone is somewhat elevated, because I usually have it on 
a stand, with the mic head at about the level of a tall person standing up, so 
not quite seat level, but certainly a realistic height, and not lift-off level. 
Either the problem is more imagined by people doing A-B comparisons rather than 
just going for a enjoyable, plausibily-realistic-sounding sound, or the amount 
of elevation above seat level required is much less than mainstream recording 
practice suggests.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 2 Apr 2012, at 23:48, newme...@aol.com wrote:

> No whiz-bang demos will make any difference!  Ambisonics is what  people 
> are doing on this list and that's just as it should be -- PLAYING with  
> *sound* with our friends!

Whiz-bang demos won't make any difference, but adoption by Apple's iTunes 
Store, or something like that would make a difference. The players have 
changed, it's no longer Sony and Panasonic that need to be convinced that 
Ambisonics is relevant, but Apple, Apple, and Apple, since Google, Android and 
Microsoft are just copying what Apple does anyway.

Without a player like Apple jumping on it, Ambisonics is dead in the water, 
because frankly I'm rather uninterested in having to set up my listening 
environment for 20 minutes before I can play some obscure avant-garde musical 
experiment in surround sound. I rather have 50% of stuff produced in 
UHJ-Stereo-AppleLossless or something like that, warts and all, than have a 
handful productions that allow me to jerk off over the technical perfection 
provided I can afford a 16 speaker periphonic high-end setup. 

Frankly, I have ZERO interest in 2nd and higher-order Ambisonics, because 
anything beyond a 5.1/4.0 setup is impractical in any home listening 
environment for 90%+ of consumers, particularly if the speakers and amps are 
supposed to be of a quality that provide for the homogenous sound field that 
Ambisonics asks for. An 8.1 home setup with 6 cheesy cardboard surround effects 
speakers and two decent stereo front speakers isn't going to be enjoyable, and 
four nice speakers already cost more than most people can afford.

So unless there's a magical technology breakthrough that allows speaker prices 
to come down an order of magnitude, anything that requires more than 4-6 
high-quality speakers is just not feasible, because it pushes the system cost 
into a realm where only a handful of people can afford to play, which limits 
things to 1st-order B-, G- or UHJ-Format. And a handful of people is just not 
enough of an incentive for content providers to deal with the (imagined) 
complexities of Ambisonic production techniques, which is even worse, because 
the purists always scream about 1st order productions (which would still be 
somewhat manageable in complexity, and the four B-format channels are still 
someone intuitively comprehensible. Try to explain the meaning of the higher 
order Ambisonics channels to your average production engineer or some 
self-recording, self-publishing garage band...)

However, everytime someone tries to do something to get 1st order stuff adopted 
somewhere, a cacophony of opposition comes from a variety of circles saying 
that it's not good enough, that the spatial resolution isn't accurate enough, 
etc. (Nevermind that the one thing that made me an Ambisonics convert was 
playing back ca. 1997 a UHJ encoded Nimbus recording on a Meridian setup, and 
comparing that to stereo on the same system, which pretty much proves that 1st 
order is plenty good enough to start with, and certainly a rather noticeable 
improvement over stereo)

There was once a slim chance of getting Apple to move on Ambisonics, as both 
some fundamental interest by some of Apple's CoreAudio group and relentless 
lobbying by an unnamed list member in an unnamed Apple product beta test group 
produced a slight opening of maybe getting 1st order B-Format adopted, when all 
the perfectionist zealots on this list more or less undermined it all by 
screaming that anything below 2nd or 3rd order is worthless, at which point 
pretty much all interest at Apple evaporated. Some people still don't get that 
I rather have imperfect 1st order Ambisonics which is perfectly adequate at 
producing realistic sounding ambiance, than wait until 50 years after my death 
to have a perfect 5th order system adopted by whoever is then a dominant player 
in audio technology.

There's a reason why there's the old phrase "Shoot the engineer, start 
production"...

Ronald


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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? (Robert Greene)

[Augustine Leudar]

So I am nervously edging towards the following conclusions :

1. Music can be mixed ambisonically and then "decoded" or "bounced
down" to Speaker configurations like 5.1, 7.1 ,1100.12 , stereo
whatever.

2. This can all be done with software - there is no need for
specialist decoders or hardware - making it more a tool for mixing
than a product that needs to be marketed to the public.

3. it is not going to be the best solution always - sometimes VBAP
might be a better option it will work better for different things.

4. More composers are starting to look at ambisonics though there is
still some resistance to it , mainly I think because its hard to get
your head around. I'm still trying to work out why stereo diffusion
into multiple speakers is more popular to many composers than
ambisonics and multichannel mixing

I think ambisonics is really going to come into its own now as more
software becomes available and new cinema setups are in the pipeline -
I think now is quite an exciting time for ambisonics.
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Re: [Sursound] Quality recordings?

[Bo-Erik Sandholm]

 
Maybe little bit out of context but...
Is there no "Audiophile society" in the vincinity of you that you can do a deal 
with so the rest of us can enjoy a good recording?

I belive there is a small corner of the market for high quality issues of 
recordings,
but you have to convince the prospective buyers that the recording is something 
special :-).

In our Swedish LTS http://www.lts.a.se/lts/skivor we did a reissue of a 
"classic" record from 1982 based on the original mastertapes,
Without any compression or other processing when creating the CD master of 
Adolphson & Falk "Med rymden i blodet"
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWRaP97D-Vg.
The resulting CD with box is sold by the society for around £10 at cost, I 
belive the deal/production was for 300 or 600 Disks.

I myself creates CD's of the choir performances my wife participates in, for 
the members of the choirs.
I record with a coresound mic, a motu traveler 3 and Reaper, i use crossed 8 
decoding or UHJ coding to stereo and NO dynamic compression.

My limited audience and I like the resulting Cd's.

By the way do anyone have a VST plugin capabale of B-format to UHJ coding?

Regards
Bo-Erik Sandholm

 



-Original Message-
From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [mailto:sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On 
Behalf Of Dave Malham
Sent: den 3 april 2012 11:00
To: Surround Sound discussion group
Subject: Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

I have to agree with this - at least, to some extent. One of the best 
recordings, in the sense of most enjoyable to me when I listened back to it, I 
ever did with the York Waits was one of the ones we did at the marvellous 
Bossal Church near York. It had to my ears a perfect balance of the acoustic of 
the space to the sound of the musicians...all down to the musicians, not me, I 
hasten to add.
But...when it went to the record company they insisted on sticking additional, 
cheesy, reverb on it "'cos that's what our customers want". Yuck :-(

Dave
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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Dave Malham]

I have to agree with this - at least, to some extent. One of the best
recordings, in the sense of most enjoyable to me when I listened back
to it, I ever did with the York Waits was one of the ones we did at
the marvellous Bossal Church near York. It had to my ears a perfect
balance of the acoustic of the space to the sound of the
musicians...all down to the musicians, not me, I hasten to add.
But...when it went to the record company they insisted on sticking
additional, cheesy, reverb on it "'cos that's what our customers
want". Yuck :-(

Dave

On 2 April 2012 17:48, Robert Greene  wrote:
>
> I agree completely.
> The elephant in the room of audio and the reproduction
> of music is that in fact most people do not seem
> to WANT music at home that sounds like music in concerts.
> They say they do, but in practice they have been conditioned--
> or perhaps they are just like that--to want something else.
>
> In the case of opera, the singers themselves want something
> different. They want mikes on THEMSELVES, individual mikes.
> Violinists can be like that too. I read a quote once
> from Perlman in response to an interviewer raising the question
> of whether he did not find one of his concerto recordings
> somewhat over balanced towards the violin
> He said(approx)
> "My fans do not want to hear the orchestra, they want to hear me."
>
> Singers are typically even worse on this,
> But personally I find opera to sound far better
> in a naturally done recording. If you can find one.
>
> One of the great things about Soundfield microphone
> recordings is that they are almost guaranteed
> to be more natural sounding than others because
> they are made from one point. RCAF is exactly right here.
> One listens from one spot.
>
> This is why something like the Unicorn Fenby Legacy Soundfield
> orchestral recording sounds so wonderful: it sounds as an
> orchestra sounds when you are there, and of course in one
> spot.
>
> Hardly anything is sillier than the idea that several
> locations of microphones separated by four or five meters
> can somehow be put together in a simple way to sound
> like real sound. Talk about all the King's horses and all
> the King's men putting Humpty together again...
>
> Robert
>
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
>
>>
>> On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aro  wrote:
>>
>>> Because Nimbus Records devoted themselves strictly to one point
>>> miking, they didn't record any operas, as the singers, choir and the
>>> orchestra are scattered in a large area and you cannot get a good
>>> balance with one point miking.
>>
>>
>> Sorry, that's bogus. When I go to the Opera, I sit at ONE SPOT.
>> IF there's anything as a good seat in the opera house in question, where
>> people in the audience can listen to a well balanced live performance, then
>> that means there is a spot for single-point recording.
>>
>> Recording the sound field at that spot should be equivalent of recording
>> the listening experience of a person sitting in that spot, and if the
>> resulting recording is decoded binaurally and played back over head phones,
>> the listener should hear what he would have heard sitting in that spot.
>>
>> Listeners in the opera house don't bounce back and forth between various
>> seats during the performance to adjust which singer is singing where on
>> stage. If the singer can't fill the room appropriately with his voice, then
>> either the room acoustics, or the singer suck (or both), and in either case
>> there's no need to make a recording of such an even anyway.
>>
>> So for real performances, single point micing, even though not a must,
>> should be adequate or superior for all events that are recorded in a venue
>> in which a live audience is supposed to have a good listening experience of
>> an equivalent performance.
>>
>> If that's not possible, there's something wrong with the microphone,
>> recording methodology, or both.
>>
>> The key benefit of ambisonic mixing is to synthesize events that didn't
>> exist in a real acoustic space, but that are supposed to create a virtual
>> reality.
>>
>> Ronald
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These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer

Dave Malham
Music Research Centre
Department of Music
The University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK
Phone 01904 322448
Fax     01904 322450
'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio'
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Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Geoffrey Barton]

> 
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2012 09:21:21 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Robert Greene 
> Subject: Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?
> To: Surround Sound discussion group 
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII
> 
> 
> Re marketing
> I am not a marketing expert
> but it seems to me that if anyone
> had really wanted Ambisonics to succeed, there would
> have been
> 1 presentations at shows for example. I have
> over the years encountered exactly one, by Meridian. Period.
> And

Its a question of when you are talking about. There were many presentations in 
the 70's in US and Europe, but at the time there was very little consumer 
surround sound around; Dolby stereo and logic decoders was about it. At the 
time (2 ch UHJ) Ambisonics was criticised for not being like a logic decoded 
Dolby Stereo. By the BBC.

> 2 there would have been low priced or free demo discs
> mixed to 5 channels. Zero on that one.

At the time BTG was promoting ambisonics there were no 5 channel discs!

> 3 Ads for said discs in audio and home theater magazines
> zero on that one
> 4 attempts to get magazines to write about it, The Absolute
> Sound, Stereophile, etc. Pretty much zero on that one, too.

look further back into late 70's, early 80's.

> 
> 5 Demonstrations at shows of Trifield and four speaker frontal
> stereo. Pretty much zero on that one, too, except for Meridian
> occasionally.

Trifield (Productions) has never had the budget to do much of that; audio was 
always peripheral to our business. Our involvement came through my earlier work 
with MAG. I financed his patents on the multispeaker decoder and also built him 
some prototypes and gave him some expenses to go to AES conventions. Meridian 
gave a lot more exposure to 'Trifield' than we could have achieved on our own.

> 
> One really gets the strong impression that the Ambisonics
> community has never seriously tried for public attention,
> and perhaps did not even want it.

Well, you said it, 'community'. As with the hard-core on Sursound now, we all 
come at it from different perspectives. There is no agreement about what we 
want to achieve, and why should there be? In commercial terms it would still be 
uphill to get Ambisonics into consumer equipment. Basically, you have to get 
through a connection called HDMI. This is limited to 8 channels which have 
moronic speaker location predications.

> 
> It is really not too late at least for Trifield. If it is really
> better, people would respond. (Actually at a Meridian demo I heard,
> I thought it sounded worse than stereo. For one thing,
> the speakers were not far enough apart so that it sounded too mono--this 
> sort of thing does not help the cause).

It happens. I remember seeing one very successful Ambisonic demonstration on 
four speakers where one (rear) speaker was later found to be unplugged.

> 
> If this is really a better way to play stereo in the sense that people
> like it better, one could demonstrate. People go to audio shows
> partly looking for interesting new ideas. But Trifield is one they
> practically never encounter.
> 
> This stuff is not hard to set up. It does not even cost very much.
> But it never seems to happen.

It is not easy to do for those who are most likely to appreciate it ie. those 
who normally listen to a system based on two decent speakers fed by a decent 
stereo amp!

Geoffrey
> 
> Robert
> 

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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Dave Malham]

Hi Robert,
   Umm - I was making exactly the opposite point - invented in the
16th century makes it, as far as music is concerned, a very new
concept. On the other hand,when talking about  "acoustic _concert_
music", it's almost tautologous that they are frontally presented,
because the whole concept of a musical concert was invented at the
same time, probably as a way of making money (I haven't researched
that, it's just a guess) - it's much more difficult to make money from
an audience who can just walk away without embarrassing themselves -
and if you don't believe that (the fear of) embarrassment is not a
strong driver, just watch an inexperienced western audience at the end
of a Gamelan concert trying to get up the courage to actually leave
the concert _during_ the ending piece :-) . Actually, talking about
Gamelan, that's a case in point - in the West (and probably
increasingly in it's home countries) Gamelan is usually presented
frontally (even we usually do that) but this is _not_ correct
traditionally.

Dave

On 2 April 2012 16:34, Robert Greene  wrote:
>
> It may be old but it is still all but universal
> in acoustic concert music.
> I think it is disingenuous to say that it is not.
> How many symphony concerts have you been to
> recently where the orchestra surrounded the audience.
> The other way around, sure.
> But I think this is just not true, that music
> with the musicians around the audience is common.
> Not in the statistical sense of percentage of
> concerts where it happens.
> Robert
>
> On Mon, 2 Apr 2012, Dave Malham wrote:
>
>> Right on - as I've said before, frontal  music is largely a development of
>> 16th century Western civilisation and is not universal, even now.
>>
>> By the way, be careful about the Gabrielli's in St. Marks - there is at
>> least some evidence that separate choirs singing antiphonally were _not
>> _used at St Mark's (see Bryant, D. "The Cori Spezzati of St. Mark's: Myth
>> and Reality" in Early Music History, Cambridge 1981, p169).
>>
>>  Dave
>>
>>
>> On 01/04/2012 10:20, Paul Hodges wrote:
>>>
>>> --On 31 March 2012 18:34 -0700 Robert Greene 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 Of course music exists that is  not in front. But the vast bulk of
 concert music is not like that.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sure; but what proportion of music are we happy to be unable to reproduce
>>> properly?  My organ music (admittedly as much as 20% of my listening) was a
>>> trivial example - and it's only in combination with other things that it
>>> becomes spatially interesting, generally.  You mentioned Gabrieli and
>>> Berlioz in a slightly dismissive manner; I would add to them people like
>>> Stockhausen and Earle Brown, a folk group moving among their audience, a
>>> hall full of schoolchildren bouncing their sounds off each other from
>>> different parts of the hall.  Not all within the restricted form of "concert
>>> music", but music in the real world where we turn our heads and enjoy our
>>> whole environment.
>>>
>>> Paul
>>>
>>
>> --
>> These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
>> /*/
>> /* Dave Malham   http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */
>> /* Music Research Centre                                             */
>> /* Department of Music    "http://music.york.ac.uk/";                 */
>> /* The University of York  Phone 01904 322448                        */
>> /* Heslington              Fax   01904 322450                        */
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These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer

Dave Malham
Music Research Centre
Department of Music
The University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
UK
Phone 01904 322448
Fax     01904 322450
'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio'
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[John Leonard]

Ten days ago, I made an archive recording of Birmingham Opera's presentation of 
Jonathan Dove's new work, Life Is A Dream at a disused factory: the orchestra 
were in a fixed position, but the performers, including a 100-strong amateur 
chorus, and the audience, moved around the space. I was very restricted in how 
I managed to make this recording and I opted for a mix of fixed and moving M/S 
set-ups, spot and ambience miking, using both a mobile Soundfield SPS200 and a 
fixed, at the orchestra position, Core-Sound TetraMic. I'm currently listening 
through the recordings in order to make a definitive archive copy and when I 
listen to the sections of the orchestral performance in surround from the 
TetraMic, the results are thrilling. Similarly, the chorus sections recorded 
with the Soundfield in the huge space of the empty warehouse listened to in 
surround, are much more involving than when I drop down to a two channel mix. 

I've recorded Dove's work before, in Peterborough, where the performers and 
audience moved from the interior of the cathedral to a shopping mall via the 
town centre and at The Hackney Empire Theatre, where there were two choirs at 
opposite sides of the top balcony, an Oud ensemble in one of the high boxes, a 
steel band and a Salvation Army band at the opposites sides of the rear of the 
theatre, a jazz ensemble in one of the stage boxes and a conventional chamber 
orchestra in the pit. This is modern, accessible material that benefits hugely 
from the space in which it's performed and, although the final edit will be in 
stereo, I will also be supplying a surround version, just for the hell of it. I 
think that there's far more spatial music out there than you might think.

Regards,

John

 
On 3 Apr 2012, at 00:58, Marc Lavallée wrote:

> 
> Two weeks ago, I saw a performance of Répons by Boulez. It was a
> canadian première, 30 years after its creation. The audience surrounded
> the orchestra, and six percussion instruments surrounded the audience,
> along with 6 speakers. It was happening in a very large room (an old
> boat factory), so there was an incredible mix of close and distant
> sounds. I saw many other concerts with instruments and sounds
> surrounding the audience, with music from John Cage, Terry Riley,
> Steve Reich, and even Schubert. It may not be common, but it does
> exist, so we should expect some more surround recordings in a not so
> distant future. One of the most interesting 5.0 recordings I heard is
> the Virtual Haydn project, that recreates the acoustic experience of
> small concert halls of the 18th century. 

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