Re: [Sursound] Release of VVEncode

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Sent from a crippled mobile device

> On 6 Oct 2015, at 17:08, David McGriffy  wrote:
> 
>  (and AU if there is demand)

Consider this me declaring demand :)
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Re: [Sursound] Audeze tetrahedral microphone

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Looks great, although, the capsules look rather large on these images…
…so I wonder how that’s going to influence the sound or what sort of 
calibration they offer. Anyone got any experience with one of these?

> On Sep 9, 2015, at 16:49, Courville, Daniel  wrote:
> 
> https://www.audeze.com/products/microphones/planar-magnetic-microphones
> 
> Hum…

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Re: [Sursound] Audeze tetrahedral microphone

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Seems to me the people who know are busy geeking out working on Nth-order stuff 
which is too complicated and expensive to be adopted widely, but which of 
course is great for academic papers.
Meanwhile people who don't try to reinvent the wheel, make all sorts of 
beginner mistakes, fall flat, and in the process prove to the average audio 
engineer that Ambisonics is a "phasy mess with mediocre-at-best sound" that 
should be dismissed as of academic-interest or game-effects only application; 
which is only only amplified by the ivory tower seclusion of the academics 
doing the research.
Would be much more useful if people would do research into hacking first order 
to become more robust, affordable, accessible, reliable, workable, such that it 
finally gets the reputation as a practical way of recording, processing, and 
distributing audio it should have.
Once it's shown real mainstream potential and has critical mass, there's plenty 
of time to geek out again.

Sent from my mobile phone, typos courtesy of "autocorrect"...

> On Sep 9, 2015, at 19:04, len moskowitz <lenmoskow...@optonline.net> wrote:
> 
> Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
> 
> 
>> Looks great, although, the capsules look rather large on these images?
> 
> 
> 100mm diameter (per their web page copy)
> 
>> ?so I wonder how that?s going to influence the sound or what sort of 
>> calibration they offer. Anyone got any experience with one of these?
> 
> 
> IMO, they have some very serious technical challenges to surmount.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Len Moskowitz (mosko...@core-sound.com)
> Core Sound LLC
> www.core-sound.com
> Home of TetraMic
> 
> 
> 
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Re: [Sursound] [OT] The more bits the better ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

I wish they would start worrying about the other compression aka loudness wars, 
before worrying about high-res audio. A well-mastered CD has all the resolution 
needed for playback, provided the playback system is good, and the original 
recording and processing was done in high-res and there were no mistakes made 
during mastering. MP3 is surprisingly good when then encoding software used is 
well written and VBR is used at the highest quality setting.
But the loudness wars will ruin any sound, and every bit over the lousiest MP3 
is a total waste until mixing/mastering changes.

Sent from a crippled mobile device

 On 21 Aug 2014, at 14:29, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote:
 
 
 One of those : 'not so much what they are sayig, but who is saying it'
 things :
 
 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/mp3-cd-24-bit-audio-music-hi-res
 
 which may, or may not, be of interest.   .   .
 
 Michael
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Re: [Sursound] Calculating speaker placement (Marc Lavall?e)

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

There's a laser distance measuring device from Bosch with built in incline 
measuring aka electronic level. Not too expensive and useful for many other 
things as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005AZZNXE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8camp=1789creative=390957creativeASIN=B005AZZNXElinkCode=as2tag=cubiculumsyst-20linkId=BE6RN3HLUWWGVJYK

There's also a bundle with an aluminum bar that turns it into a level, but for 
this purpose the device tripod-mounted would be good enough, as long as the 
tripod head has markings for the horizontal angles.

Ronald

Sent from my mobile phone

 On 11 Jul 2014, at 20:43, Marc Lavallée m...@hacklava.net wrote:
 
 Hi Steve. 
 
 I understand your problem. I have a similar one; in my case the
 calculations and the installation were easy, but I'd like to measure
 the exact angular positions of the (installed) loudspeakers. 
 
 First you need the angular positions of the loudspeakers from
 the listening spot. It shouldn't be too difficult to calculate for your
 layout, knowing the properties of the dodecahedron (and some
 trigonometry).
 
 Then you'd need some tool to report the angular positions on the
 walls, ceiling and floor, as seen from the listening spot. It could
 also be used to measure the installed loudspeaker positions.
 
 I suppose it could be made with a levelled tripod that can display
 horizontal angle positions, a tiltable plate with and inclinometer (or
 clinometer) to display vertical positions, and a laser pointer to
 report the positions, making sure that the pointer is perfectly
 installed on the plate and that the intersection of both axis is at the
 listening spot. For the distances, a soft measuring tape could be
 attached to the end of the plate. I hope it make sense...
 
 I found a few clinometer apps for mobile devices that are cheaper
 than digital clinometers. There's also analog clinometers (like those
 for satellite dish installation), and it's possible to build one.
 
 Maybe there's an easier solution.
 --
 Marc
 
 Fri, 11 Jul 2014 02:00:25 +0100,
 Steve Boardman boardroomout...@gmail.com wrote :
 You can use golden rectangles (of ratio 1/1.618) to calculate
 placements of your speakers. You can refer to:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icosahedron
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecahedron
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle
 
 --
 Marc
 
 Hi Mark
 
 Of course, but not sure how easy this may be in practice. 
 Would I use the first golden rectangle on the smallest plane, and
 intersect the others with that. Then use each rectangle corner as a
 line from centre until it hits reaches a wall and then mark the
 speaker  position? The problem I have is the room has a sloping
 ceiling, low at front and then high at the back. I would prefer to
 extend the angles and attach speakers to the boundaries rather than
 build a frame to hold them, as that would use up space and become an
 obstruction. It is also easier to attach to walls and ceiling. I was
 thinking of having the face of a Dodecahedron on the floor. This way
 there will be less obstruction in the room and I will only have to
 embed one speaker in the floor (i'm using both the vertices and faces
 of dodecahedron). Does anyone know of a simpler and maybe more
 accurate method?
 
 Thanks
 
 Steve
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Re: [Sursound] 4 D sound (!)

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 5 Mar 2014, at 11:58, Dave Malham dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:

 And now, 4-D sound
 
 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/03/full-immersion-audio-artists-explore-4dsound-spatial-grid-omni-speakers-ableton-max-lemur/
 
 X, Y, Z  and...

Time, it's 3-D sound in Space-Time ;)

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] 4 D sound (!)

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

There is no sound without time, so time being a dimension should strictly 
speaking always result in a +1 on the dimension count from traditional 
accounting...

Ronald

On 5 Mar 2014, at 12:53, Eero Aro eero@dlc.fi wrote:

 Nah
 
 With my Serious Bloke hat on:
 
 Mono is 0,5 D sound. Distance and depth in front of the listener.
 
 Stereo is 1,5 D sound. Left-Right / distance and depth in front of the 
 listener.
 
 Pantophonics is 2D. Front-Back, Left-Right.
 
 Periphonics is 3D. Front-Back, Left-Right, Up-Down. (Binaural also, if it 
 would work.)
 
 Eero
 
 5.3.2014 13:42, Dave Malham kirjoitti:
 Ah, but if that's the case, mono is 2-D sound, stereo is 3-D sound
 :-)
 
 
 On 5 March 2014 11:08, Ronald C.F. Antony r...@cubiculum.com wrote:
 
 
 On 5 Mar 2014, at 11:58, Dave Malham dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:
 
 And now, 4-D sound
 
 
 http://createdigitalmusic.com/2014/03/full-immersion-audio-artists-explore-4dsound-spatial-grid-omni-speakers-ableton-max-lemur/
 
 X, Y, Z  and...
 
 Time, it's 3-D sound in Space-Time ;)
 
 Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] ambiX v0.1 Ambisonic software, mcfx v0.1

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Hi, 

sounds great! Any plans to also make an AU version of the plugins for OSX?

Best regards, 

Ronald

On 25 Jan 2014, at 20:11, Matthias Kronlachner 
m.kronlach...@student.tugraz.at wrote:

 i finally got my ambisonic plug-ins to a stage where i'd like to share them 
 with the community.
 these are working under windows, osx and linux as vst, lv2 and standalone 
 applications. (the linux version still needs some treat - help wanted!)

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Re: [Sursound] New native B-Format microphone!

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Just like patenting aspects of the iPhone works with prior art of mobile phones 
and computers.
For all we know they patented a user interface aspect of their processing 
software ;)

Ronald

On 14 Nov 2013, at 04:59, Jon Honeyball j...@jonhoneyball.com wrote:

 And how does The patented technology allows pickup polar patterns and
 direction
 to be freely adjusted,even after the actual recording event (in mixdown)²
 
 work with prior art from the sound field?
 
 Jon
 
 On 14/11/2013 09:43, Emanuele lamacchiaco...@yahoo.it wrote:
 
 Anyone have it and can tell us how it sounds?
 Are the capsules in a tetraedical position?
 
 Thanks.
 
 Emanuele
 
 On 13/11/2013 20:00, Daniel Courville wrote:
 http://www.nu47.com/NU-880F.pdf
 
 
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Re: [Sursound] Sense of direction (whole new idea)

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Make a mic mount with an iPhone holder, and you can use compass and gyroscopes 
as well as GPS. 

That way you have location data and mic orientation data captured and can 
auto-transform the signal based on that.

Just be sure to turn off the mobile phone radio, because GSM signaling causes 
nasty pulses in recordings (not even talking about the phone ringing next to 
the microphone ;) )


Sent from my mobile phone
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Re: [Sursound] Sennheiser Esfera

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 14 Sep 2013, at 05:11, Eric Carmichel e...@elcaudio.com wrote:

 But some of the industrial spaces, places and noises could make for 
 interesting Ambisonic recordings.

Might also be interesting spaces to do Ambisonic impulse response recordings...

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Re: [Sursound] A higher standard of standardness

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

I can appreciate both sides of the argument. However, one thing that I would 
love to see:

a) sterile, measurement-like recording of as close to possible to what happened 
recording
b) post processing with whatever effects, tricks, etc. is required to have 
things sound pleasant and engaging.

What I don't like is the idea of b) being part of a)

In other words, if I want to fatten up the sound then I want a fatten up the 
sound plug-in to process an anemic recording. I don't want the recording be 
molested by a fatten up the sound microphone or fatten up the sound preamp.

Basically, the aesthetic choices should be separated from capturing the raw 
data as much as anyhow possible, if not for any other reason than to allow some 
alternat aesthetic choices to be made at some later point in time to take into 
account differing tastes, playback devices and environments.

If the raw master recording already has too many artistic/aesthetic choices 
nailed down, it makes it less valuable a resource for posterity.

Ronald


On 6 Jul 2013, at 03:34, Dave Malham dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:

 All of this, of course, just goes to show how subjective recording is.  In
 my younger days I naively thought that we should be working towards exactly
 re-creating a soundfield as a way of making the best possible recording.
 But until such time the day comes that we can record and reproduce, in our
 own living rooms, the position of every molecule of air over a  significant
 volume in real time _and_ make due allowance for the effect of the listener
 and furniture that wasn't there in the original
 
 However, and unfortunately even with that accomplished, we would not
 recreate (or create) the percept we would have gotten had we been at the
 concert because we haven't walked/cycled/driven to the concert hall, nor
 eaten the same food in the same restaurant beforehand, nor met the same
 people, or... Anyway, at this point I can hear Peter Lennox laughing his
 head off, because that was exactly what we used to argue about when he was
 at York - and his side of the argument :-)
 
 Dave
 
 On 5 July 2013 22:16, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote:
 
 On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 10:04:46PM +0100, Paul Hodges wrote:
 --On 05 July 2013 20:54 + Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org
 wrote:
 
 1) two coincident hyper cardioids
 
 My preferred one. Iff the mics are available. If not,
 see below.
 
 I commonly do that too (from the B-format, of course!),
 
 With very few exceptions, whenever I have to produce
 stereo from a B-format recording (with the mic placed
 to optimise the Ambisonic rendering), I end up with
 two virtual hypercardioids at 120 degrees or so.
 
 but also
 Blumlein, depending on the room.  Crossed hyper-cardioids is similar
 to MS with a front-facing cardioid, of course, as another
 alternative if no hyper-cardioids are available.
 
 As for spaciousness, which is usually associated with spaced mics, I
 suggest that out-of-phase components also contribute (which Bob
 Katz's comments seem to my mind to support).
 
 They certainly do. You'd want more or less random phase
 for the diffuse part of the reverb.
 
 Ciao,
 
 --
 FA
 
 A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia.
 It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris
 and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)
 
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 -- 
 -- 
 As of 1st October 2012, I have retired from the University.
 
 These are my own views and may or may not be shared by the University
 
 Dave Malham
 Honorary Fellow, Department of Music
 The University of York
 York YO10 5DD
 UK
 
 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio'
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Re: [Sursound] Making a standalone 8ch player

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 27 May 2013, at 21:23, Sampo Syreeni de...@iki.fi wrote:

 24/96 is already twice as much even as a non-shaped format, but perhaps has 
 to be chosen evenso if we want to be sure it's transparent; as the next 
 common format which includes both sufficient sampling rate and sufficiently 
 low self-noise to truly cover even the most nastiest of circumstances. If 
 nothing else, we can be fully sure nothing above that will *ever* be needed 
 even if we just treat it as a naively, TPDF-dithered, somewhat frequency 
 limited at the upper end channel.

One notable exception: pitch processing e.g. in a sampler when sort of slow 
down playback, or digital spinning of disks by DJs etc.

Also, digital volume controls may benefit from higher than 20-bit word length.

But one would think capture at 96/24 should cover 98% of all scenarios, 
particularly since DJs rarely spin chamber music.

Different story with scientific recordings of sound, think bat or whale 
studies, but that an entirely different game.

Sent from my mobile phone

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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 May 2013, at 03:45, Eero Aro eero@dlc.fi wrote:

 Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 I would tend to differ. If BluRay  DVD-Audio were resounding
 successes, then one could say: heck, just deliver binaural, stereo,
 5.1 etc. downmixes and not worry about distribution formats, these
 disks have more storage capacity than we know to fill with an album
 anyway.
 
 There is the word commercial in the thread subject.
 
 I don't think any commercial company would like to use their resources
 to produce different kinds of audio format tracks onto a disc just because
 it is possible to fill it up. That would increase the production costs but
 wouldn't bring too much more money in.
 
 If they'd like to do that, there would be also binaural tracks already now
 on every DVD you get from the shop.
 
 In my thinking BluRay and DVD-Audio are delivery mediums.
 Isn't DVD-Audio past and gone?

That's my point: physical media, for better or worse, is gone.

Someone made the point that as far as they are concerned Ambisonics is more of 
production tool than a delivery format, because Ambisonic productions can be 
downmixed to various delivery media formats.

My point is, physical media is gone. So while in the case of physical media, 
one can easily (and without significant added cost) downmix an Ambisonic 
production to 5.1, 7.1, stereo, and binaural, and still ship it on the same 
media (provided one chooses Ambisonic production behind the scenes), that 
doesn't hold true in the case of electronic delivery.

Once you enter electronic delivery, you'd either have spend a lot more 
(expensive) bandwidth, and/or sell different versions of the same program 
material, or *TA-DAH* you use B-format as a delivery format and push the 
decision in what way to reproduce the material to the end user.

In other words, in a world in which physical, disc-based delivery dominates, 
Ambisonics holds little value as a delivery Format, because current disk 
formats have so much spare capacity that it's easy to just pre-decode all the 
potentially interesting playback formats, and be done. One can keep Ambisonics 
out of the home, and use it strictly as a production too.

However, once you enter the digital distribution, where you have billions of 
downloads, and where user-side disk storage is limited (albeit getting 
cheaper), that's when you have an economic interest in least redundant data 
transmission and storage.

At this point, just about all the relevant (not talking niche players, but 
Amazon, Apple, Google, Spottify, etc.) players in the digital music delivery 
business are restricted to compressed stereo audio. 

Ambisonic B-format or even UHJ-format delivery has an opening here, provided 
the bickering stops and a concerted effort is made to lobby the players 
involved, because for a reasonably moderate bandwidth overhead, these outfits 
now can deliver a data file/stream that can be played back in stereo, binaural, 
surround, and the decision can be pushed to the end-user environment. 

A strong eco-system like iTunes could use B-format with proper software 
changes, weaker eco systems could use UHJ, and simply have UHJ-capable players, 
but in the absence of such, would still end up serving perfectly usable stereo 
files.

So, I think, right now, with the demise of physical media, and still rather 
limited bandwidth and end-user storage, there's a perfect sweet spot to 
introduce UHJ/B-Format as a delivery for universally compatible audio 
files/streams.

If one could get together a strong community effort, a few major acts providing 
some key productions to get things off the ground, then that would be a 
relaunch of it all.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 May 2013, at 05:24, Richard G Elen re...@brideswell.com wrote:

 Ambisonic B-format or even UHJ-format delivery has an opening here, provided 
 the bickering stops and a concerted effort is made to lobby the players 
 involved, because for a reasonably moderate bandwidth overhead, these 
 outfits now can deliver a data file/stream that can be played back in 
 stereo, binaural, surround, and the decision can be pushed to the end-user 
 environment.
 
 This is another version of the lobby the record companies to adopt xxx 
 technology argument, which never worked in the past.

Nope. Screw the record industry. This is lobby the distributors.
Google, Apple, Amazon, these are the driving forces, they call the shots, not 
the record industry. Each one of them is going to try hard to differentiate 
themselves from the rest of the competitors, each one of them has a lot of 
muscle to get stuff they want from the content providers if that means the 
content providers can gain ever-so-little power back over the distributors 
calling the shots.

e.g. if distributor A can get the content providers to allow them to 
exclusively distribute UHJ-stereo at a digital lossless format, while charging 
$1.29 instead of $0.99 provided they can get an exclusive, and market the 
living shit out of it, to differntiate their digital storefront from the 
others, meanwhile distributor B may get a deal for B-Format for a $1.49 while 
distributor C gets stuck at $0.99 for lossily compressed stereo, then the 
content providers gain by increasing their revenue, and each of the 
distributors gains by hitting a different sweet spot in the market.

Not saying that's exactly how things would be carved up, but that's just a 
thought experiment.

You want to save money, you go to C, you want the best of the best, you go to 
B, you want a better quality, with some ambience and a no-head-ache file 
compatibility, you go to vendor A.
Overall revenues increase, vendors can differentiate their stores from each 
other, so they gain, and customers gain because they have more choice.

Record companies have become as irrelevant as mobile phone companies. What 
matters at this point are the platform providers, be that Apple, Microsoft, 
Google, Samsung.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 May 2013, at 05:24, Richard G Elen re...@brideswell.com wrote:

 A strong eco-system like iTunes could use B-format with proper software 
 changes, weaker eco systems could use UHJ, and simply have UHJ-capable 
 players, but in the absence of such, would still end up serving perfectly 
 usable stereo files.
 
 So, I think you are on to something here. Or maybe it's a chimera and what is 
 needed is a totally digital encoding scheme that does the same thing but owes 
 nothing to UHJ.

I think the MP4 container format would easily allow that. The question is if 
e.g. Apple would tolerate if you send them a file that's two or three times the 
size it needs to be, because it adds an extended tag that points to additional 
audio streams, particularly if the iTunes.app couldn't play them back and it 
would require a third party app to play it back.
So Apple would carry the cost of extra bandwidth and some other vendor would 
reap the benefits of fully utilizing the audio files. They'd not swallow that.

That's why the deals need to be made with the Apple's, Google's etc. of this 
world, because they provide the infrastructure. Nobody has as seamless a 
purchase and playback experience as Apple does. So from that POV, gaining Apple 
as an ally for such an enterprise would be top.

On the other hand, all of the others try to compete against Apple by gaining 
some sort of edge over Apple. So they might be motivated to be the first ones 
to offer this, if they can make Apple look backwards.

It's that sort of dynamic that would have to be used to get Ambisonics back 
into the game.

The record companies don't really figure into that, because the major players 
are big enough to directly make deals with major acts to get desirable content 
in their stores. e.g. remember the Apple deals they had with U2, etc. so any of 
them is financially big and powerful enough that they can get some world-class 
act to produce some content for the launch of that platform, and others will 
follow suit.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 May 2013, at 05:55, Richard G Elen re...@brideswell.com wrote:

 On 16/05/2013 10:36, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 This is another version of the lobby the record companies to adopt xxx 
 technology argument, which never worked in the past.
 Nope. Screw the record industry. This is lobby the distributors.
 Google, Apple, Amazon, these are the driving forces, they call the shots, 
 not the record industry.
 
 I think I wasn't clear on this. I regard lobby the [anyone] as a lost cause 
 unless you're, say, Dolby. I mean that lobby the distribs is the same 
 tactic as lobby the record companies was in the old days, and it's doomed 
 to fail. We don't have the muscle.

I said lobby not bully ;)

Of course we don't have the muscle. But that's not what it's about. The 
question if one can convince one of the players if the small investment is 
worth it to be able to differentiate themselves against their competition in a 
market that's otherwise dominated by me-too products.

Look at how that dumb Samsung feature of waving in front of the phone is hyped 
up:
Oh, but when I'm eating ribs, I don't want to touch the phone with the greasy 
fingers, but now I can just wave my hands, and it will pick up on speaker phone 
without me touching the phone.
Plays really well in commercials, but in reality, you'll likely have the phone 
in the pockets of your pants, and you'll have to touch the phone and the pants 
before you could even wave your hands in front of the phone.

Comparatively speaking, surround sound for music is a much bigger deal than 
waving your greasy hands in front of a phone to make it answer.

So if that silly feature is worth that much advertising time, how much is it 
worth to have better functionality in an entire music infrastructure vs. just 
in a particular model phone?

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 May 2013, at 14:32, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ah, another  new business model for music delivered via the WWW...  
 :-)
 
 Just to warn you: These exclusive contracts (where Majors pick just one 
 distributor for a special format) might not work, in a legal sense.

Sure. Just as Apple's DRM m4a format was and remains an exclusive to Apple.

 As a musician (and if musicians have a say, which still can be the case) I 
 would refuse this model, because it would lead to   complete fragmentation  
 of the surround online market.

Not really. But it rewards the early adopters. Nobody would or could sign a 
contract that is indefinite. Just like ATT eventually lost it's exclusive 
status with the iPhone, so that would happen with the formats or their 
equivalents. 

Amazon still sells MP3, while Apple continues to sell MP4-AAC, but that hasn't 
led to a complete fragmentation of the stereo online market.

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Re: [Sursound] The commercial future of Ambisonics

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 15 May 2013, at 07:42, Eero Aro eero@dlc.fi wrote:

 Ivan Vican:
 does Ambisonic have a commercial future and why?
 
 I would say that it is a waste of time and energy to try to get
 Ambisonics as a distribution medium.
 
 Ambisonics has and will have use in production and processing tools.
 Microphones, mixing, effects etc.
 
 The end user at home or in a theatre doesn't care what technique
 was used to deliver or to create the sound that he/she is hearing.
 Most people are not interested in which brand synthesizer or editing
 software or processing plugins have been used. You ears won't
 care about the trade marks either.

I would tend to differ. If BluRay  DVD-Audio were resounding successes, then 
one could say: heck, just deliver binaural, stereo, 5.1 etc. downmixes and not 
worry about distribution formats, these disks have more storage capacity than 
we know to fill with an album anyway.

On the other hand, data volume does matter if you have online music 
distribution, and when you look at computer playback, would you expect the 
consumer to try to match the proper version to his current audio setup?

As long as online music distribution grows at the rates it's growing at, and as 
long as everything there is stereo, something like iTunes plug-ins, and UHJ 
mixes have a use, and if one could form a partnership with some of the big fish 
out there, like e.g. Apple, then B-Format distribution would be a viable way 
for music distribution, because one B-format source could cover all the 
applications ranging from binaural, to stereo and N.M channel surround.

However, that case has to be made, and people would have to be unified when 
trying to push such a case, and not end up bickering about how anything below 
3rd order is unacceptable when we exactly know that anything as relatively 
complex as 3rd order will never happen as a first step.

The geek factor someone else describes that makes Ambisonics inaccessible to 
mere mortals, is significantly reduced, because the 3/4 channels of 1st order 
wihout/with height are intuitively understandable, because concepts like XYZ 
axis are fairly common knowledge, but Nth-order spherical harmonics are not, 
and will just get blank stares, and once you start talking about lobes, they 
think you're making smart ass comments about their pierced ears.

Even as a production technique, a large number of people in studios got in 
there over music, they are not audio engineers in the strict sense who read AES 
papers while brushing their teeth in the morning to relax, and have often 
little to no background in math. So I still believe unless HOA is completely 
hidden inside individual plug-ins (e.g. a surround panning plug-in) it is 
unsuitable in the workflow to popularize the techniques.

1st order could stand a chance, because it can be intuitively understood, and 
once demystified and reasonably wide-spread, HOA can be the 2.0Pro and 3.0Ultra 
package.


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Re: [Sursound] what mics do you use?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Given the subject of mics:

Has anyone experience with this here:

http://www.nevatonmics.com/pdf/Nevaton_Flyer_centerfold_v2.pdf

Looks like since the four capsules are individually wired, it could be used for 
1st order HOA recording.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] 3/7/2013 6:15:15 AM

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Better solution is to moderate new subscribers, low chance of long term members 
suddenly turning into spammers.

Sent from my mobile phone

On 07 Mar 2013, at 11:49, Kees de Visser k...@galaxyclassics.com wrote:

 On 7 Mar 2013, at 10:54, Carsten Bohn wrote:
 Dear List !
 
 http://www.easyhomethai.com/lxo/edjf/mko/msgwi/zdrmrlyq
 A A
 
 It looks like the invasion begins - I guess I'm not the only one who 
 received this message, or am I ??
 What's the best way to avoid mo' spam like this ??
 
 I got the msg too. An effective solution is to moderate every submission 
 before distributing it to the list, but that will slow down the posting 
 process, especially when members have different timezones.
 Let's see if it's really a spam invasion. It could be an incident :)
 
 Kees de Visser
 Galaxy Classics
 
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Re: [Sursound] A proposal for an Ambisonics based 3D audio codec, MPEG/ITU style...

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 23 Jan 2013, at 02:53, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 P.S.: FLAC was the first widely used codec for lossless compression, so here 
 the commercial competition has a problem.

How so? FLAC has a different design objective than some of the commercial 
lossless codecs.
FLAC was intended mostly for rippers, i.e. people who want to encode a lot of 
CDs, and store them and play them back on computers, so a big emphasis was 
encoding speed.

Other algorithms are designed for max. compression and are thus slower and use 
more CPU but use less space. Others are optimized for minimal CPU use during 
decompression, such as to be workable on low power CPUs in portable devices.

FLAC is but a choice, and not always the best one, from a technical point of 
view, even though it's free.

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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 1 Nov 2012, at 06:24, Peter Lennox p.len...@derby.ac.uk wrote:

 Download the binaural for binaural use, and the stereo for stereo use? - in 
 fact, instead of trying to make one format fit all - people could just 
 download a folder and extract the ones they needed...

That's an academic solution. That's like saying: who needs an ambisonic 
decoder, just use Bidule, or something like that. 

We're not talking about how some enthusiast can cobble together a solution, but 
how a particular technology is made accessible to the masses. It has to be 
automatic. People don't want to be bothered about which song to choose, just as 
they don't want to be bothered with selecting an SMTP port for their e-mail 
client.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 1 Nov 2012, at 22:30, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 
 
 Object Oriented programming was available 1978/1980. It wasn't used until 
 NeXT started pushing ObjC and SUN tried to rip it off unsuccessfully with 
 Java (which barely qualifies because for several iterations of the language 
 it missed key elements of a real OOP language), and despite NeXT, and even 
 despite OS X, OOP languages became only truly mainstream with later 
 iterations of the Java language and with the success of iOS devices and the 
 resulting surge in ObjC programming. (And even ppl now use OOP languages, a 
 lot of the code written is bad, and thus doesn't count as OOP.)
 
 
 It wasn't used until NeXT started pushing ObjC and SUN tried to rip it off 
 unsuccessfully with Java 
 
 
 Even if I agree with some of your opinions, this is utter nonsense.
 
 - Java is a highly successful programing language, namely for Internet and 
 business applications.

And all that happened MUCH AFTER NEXT. Remember, the WWW was invented on the 
NeXT, and it was invented only, because OOP gave TBL enough leverage to write a 
web server and client in reasonably short time. Java wasn't even conceived 
until well after the web had taken off.
So it's very accurate to say that OOP hasn't taken off until after later 
iterations of the Java language, because the first few barely even qualified to 
be called OOP languages.

 The VM model in a C based language was a major innovation, now copied by 
 JavaScript/ECMA Script etc.

The VM model has NOTHING to do with OOP.

 - C++ existed before NeXT.

C++ is NOT an OOP language, it's a class-based language, but OOP requires 
dynamicism and run-time message lookup and binding, which C++ does not have. 
OOP also requires decent reflection, which Java only gained after several 
iterations of language revisions (and which is still somewhat clumsy).

If you want to know what OOP is, you have to use the definition of the inventor 
of the concept, Alan Kay, and not the definition of the people who don't 
understand the concept and try to peddle their language as something it is not, 
because it happens to be a buzz-word at the time.

In case you doubt me, you may want to read e.g. this here:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKaysDefinitionOfObjectOriented

 
 - Windows NT is partially based on C++. Therefore Microsoft was earlier in 
 the application of OOP languages then most other companies, including Apple 
 at this time.

The choice of language doesn't imply the choice of a programming model, and 
again, C++ is not an OOPL.

 - NeXT lended heavily on existing stuff, such as the MACH kernel and BSD Unix.

So what? Just about everything that made the NeXT unique, aside from DPS, was 
OOP, in particular all the frameworks which are now in their revised versions 
called Cocoa, Cocoa-Touch, etc.

MACH is an OS kernel, it has nothing to do with OOP and OOPL.


 You are too sure of your theories, see above.

You counter arguments go totally past the point, because they are about things 
I wasn't even talking about.

 Consumers will not ask for technical things, they will ask for a repeat of 
 an experience they had sometime and thought was great. That's how I got 
 introduced to Ambisonics: heard a UHJ Nimbus recording on a Meridian system.
 
 
 Meridian is truly a high end company, hardly consumer stuff.

That's like saying Mercedes isn't a consumer company because their cars cost 
more than Hundays's.
There are very few things, and in particular no relevant concepts, that 
Meridian uses that couldn't be just as well be used by Onkyo, Sony, etc. except 
that they choose not to implement Ambisonics decoding in their products.
I wasn't sold on Ambisonics because a Meridian system sounded so much better 
than my own system, but because Ambisonics on a Meridian system sounded so much 
better than Stereo on the exactly same Meridian system in the exactly same 
playback environment.
And that's a testament to how incredibly useful even lowly UHJ encoded 
Ambisonics is.


 Except it was so bad I never wanted to go back to Stereo again. 
 So I want others to have similarly horrible experiences, such that they, 
 too, don't want stereo anymore, either.
 
 UHJ is good enough for a start, a binaural decoder could easily become part 
 of iOS and Android devices by means of a custom playback app. Instant 
 surround sound access for the masses.
 
 
 And this is the point: IF a binaural system works, you can include 5.1 -- 
 binaural (or HOA -- binaural) decoding. Both source formats  are in many 
 senses better than UHJ surround...   ;-)


Except that 5.1 uses a lot more storage, and if you have storage limited 
portable devices that's HUGE. And also most 5.1 stuff SUCKS, because it's not 
G-format, ambisonically mixed surround, but some pan-pot abomination that is 
horrible even on a perfect 5.1 setup.
HOA uses even more storage.
These suggestions simply prove how out of touch with the market

Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 1 Nov 2012, at 22:47, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:

 You're angry at reality. I'm not making these things up, nor do they 
 constitute my ideal world. But I'm willing to face the reality and ask which 
 small steps can we take to get from here to there by infiltrating what 
 actual consumers use, rather than being preoccupied with lab experiments and 
 boutique recordings that cater to a bunch of enthusiasts.
 Nobody who matters (i.e. average consumer) is interested in a dorky 
 head-tracking headphone setup that makes him/her look like a Borg from Star 
 Trek.
 
 
 I think this is just half-educated. Wasn't the success of the Wii console 
 based on some gyroscope/motion sensors, which are build in into the remote 
 controller?
 
 Don't have  even many  mobile phones  and  laptops motion controllers?

And what does that do for head-tracking? Do you want to carry your iPhone on 
some head-mount?
Looks really stylish, will be a huge market success... NOT!

 Headphones are accessories that need to be fashionable, because people know 
 they are going to be seen in public wearing them. That's reality. Get used 
 to it. That's why stuff like Beats by Dr. Dre sells (cool DJs have them) 
 and nobody would want to be caught dead wearing top-notch studio head phones.
 
 Thanks for the education!   :-D
 
 Bayer and Sennheiser still sell more stuff than Dr. Dre. You are welcome to 
 buy fashionble products by Dr. Dre, Apfel, or whoever is currently in fashion.

It's not about me, I listen to music on my HD650, but I'm not the market, I'm 
an enthusiast. But unlike you, I realize that this isn't the norm, nor would I 
wear the HD650 while jogging or working out in the gym, and like it or not, 
that's where people tend to listen to music.

 Don't hold your breath for a fashionable Apple TV, though. (I mean the iTV, 
 BTW. Apple didn't figure out yet what this actually is all about...:-X )

I didn't bring that up, you did, but we'll see in the future if they figured it 
out or not. But even their current set top box sells in the millions, because 
it has tangible benefits in a networked home, allowing content to be streamed 
all over the house.

Ronald


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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 1 Nov 2012, at 23:07, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 The next and valid question is if stereo via headphones actually works so 
 well at all... (Many people have problems, such as in-head effects, lack of 
 perceived real space, etc.)
 
 If you would fix these problems, then you could probably also reproduce 
 convincing binaural surround via headphones.

Of course stereo doesn't work through headphones! That's why there's a 
difference between stereo and binaural, because stereo assumes speakers being 
IN FRONT of the listener, not perpendicularly left and right of the listener. 
That's why there are head phone processors which in essence transcode regular 
stereo into binaural stereo.

Sennheiser sold such a processor for a while, I still have it somewhere. It 
worked rather well, except that the electronics were of inferior quality using 
cheap, low-power components. So then I had the choice of listening to 
super-clean audio from my Metric Halo headphone output, but have in head 
stereo, or to listen to grungy, muddy sound, with the proper sound stage.

That's also EXACTLY why UHJ needs to be decoded to binaural, because being 
stereo compatible, without decoding it works just as well or just as badly as 
regular stereo works on headphones.

A mobile device music player app can solve these issues for both UHJ and 
regular stereo by doing the proper binaural decoding/transcoding, and since 
it's an app and not a hardwired appliance, it's easy to let users select 
different HRTF in the app's preferences, or even let advanced users load 
personalized HRTFs.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Sent from my mobile phone

On 31 Oct 2012, at 07:08, Peter Lennox p.len...@derby.ac.uk wrote:

 Yes but...why not simply release stuff for mobiles in a generic binaural - 
 skip the uhj altogether?

Because you also want to listen to the same piece on your home and car stereo?

Ronald 
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Re: [Sursound] Ambisonic 'File' Formats

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Whatever it is, if it's a 32-bit file format, it should be considered 
deprecated.

CAF is at least explicitly designed to be a 64-bit format. It's also designed 
such that during recording a crash of the app can leave a recoverable file 
behind by the way the header structures are designed, much like in the old days 
SDII files had that property and were thus a preferred choice of many in the 
audio field.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/MusicAudio/Reference/CAFSpec/CAFSpec.pdf

Any compression used should prioritize fast and CPU efficient decompression 
over max. compression ratio, because a file is compressed once, but 
decompressed many times, often on mobile devices. As such, an open standard 
that is implemented by many hardware devices would be rather useful. Apple 
Lossless comes to mind, which is fully documented and available under the 
Apache 2.0 license: http://alac.macosforge.org/


Ronald


On 30 Oct 2012, at 12:01, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote:

 There's also the possibility of a new version of Broadcast Wav (BWF).
 
 Dave
 
 Thanks Dave, URL and/or other reference ???
 
 
 'Native' CAF also has the possibility for 'W,X,Y,Z' so (again without
 acknowledgment) I suspect that could be counted as a *.amb
 variant.
 
 MPEG formats: anyone have the key URLs ?
 
 Technicolor ... started this round.
 
 Anymore ?
 
 Michael
 
 
 On 30 October 2012 09:40, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com wrote:
 
 The thing that is really annoying, really frustrating, is that the
 community that I am trying to serve (which includes me) keeps shooting
 itself in the foot, incessantly, year after year, by arguing over the
 same details, over and over and over. ED, Sunday.
 
 At the risk of another abortive cycle.
 
 We seem to have:
 
 Richard Dobson's *.amb
 Widely used, widely accepted.
 Problematic as order number increases.
 Has the underlying *.wav problems (and advantages).
 
 Etienne Deleflie's 'UA'
 I had thought this had been dropped in favour of
 the fourth of these, so have rather taken my 'eye
 off the ball'.
 Perhaps Etienne could comment (he is one of the
 author's of the fourth).
 
 The Graz Proposal of 2009.
 This fell on stoney ground ;-(
 It was CAF based, and we did have promises of
 a 'CafPak' from the 'WavPak' development team.
 http://mchapman.com/amb/reprints/AFF
 
 The Kenticky Proposal of 2010.
 The current situation is:
 a library available at
 http://iem.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=iem/ambix;a=summary
 and the unofficial documentation at
 http://iem.at/~zmoelnig/libambix/ambix_8h.html
 
 I'll happily put up a webpage with URLs / links
 to them all (and any others).
 Even try a Wikipedia type table of 'what does/offers
 what' (if the authors will assist).
 (And genericlly these re not 'file format's so much
 as 'interchange formats' (files, streams, ... .)
 
 Once we've got the facts straight perhaps we could
 recommence on a solid basis ??
 
 __
 
 
 [  .  .  .  ]
 
 
 
 
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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 29 Oct 2012, at 20:42, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ronald, most if not all (classical) recordings where I am participating are 
 done in a way that they could be issued in 5.1 (or say 5.0) surround, namely 
 several Pentatone recordings, and even the more recent television/radio stuff.
 

 I would guess that every good orchestra recording is done in this way (which 
 means could be issued in 2.0/stereo, 5.1 or other formats).

Yes, that may be true, but the vast majority of these recordings is done in a 
way of the one microphone per speaker mentality, not in the let's record a 
sound field mentality.
So while it may be surround, it's not Ambisonics, and it's the latter that I'm 
interested in, and not some hare-brained system like traditional 5.1 recording.
The only interest I have in 5.1 is as a delivery format for G-format predecoded 
Ambisonics. But 5.1 outside of movies pretty much is dead in the water for 
music, a handful of boutique recordings aside, which really don't matter. What 
we need is a catalog in the 10s or 100s of thousands of recordings, and 
recordings with the artists the general public wants to hear, not a few 
boutique recordings that a few surround sound fanatics are interested in mostly 
due to the fact that they are surround recordings, not because they crave the 
music and artists who were recorded. These boutique recordings are more or less 
nothing but technology demonstrations, and thus are mostly only of technical 
interest.

 My hint to Dolby Surround was ironic (as many guys on this list oppose 
 anything from Dolby), but you have to admit that there exist many (matrixed) 
 Dolby surround mixes for film use. (And also and very obviously discrete 5.1 
 surround mixes, which are superior.)

I don't oppose anything from Dolby, but I dislike the company because they have 
more than once sunk good technology because it didn't fit their specific 
business interests, and have thus been a major roadblock for progress. If they 
were to pick up the baton and would advocate the right changes, I'd be all for 
them. Likely that would only happen if they could hold a ton of key patents and 
charge everyone massive licensing fees for them; otherwise they don't seem to 
be interested. They rather go and invent an octagon wheel, patent it and use 
their influence to peddle it, than use the round wheel they can't charge 
royalties for.

 UHJ works, but it is also a matrixed format and arguably not a complete 
 surround format, because 2 cannels are not enough. (I would say 5.1 is 
 better, this doesn't seem to be an opinion.)
 Secondly, the UHJ system should have some issues even in stereo, because of 
 the matrix.

Of course, 5.1 (as G-format) would be better than UHJ, but 5.1 isn't widely 
used for music, while stereo is. So unless that changes, we can either ship 
RIGHT NOW UHJ into the stereo music channel, or we can bitch and whine that 
there is no surround recordings on the market, because there's no proper 
distribution channel for the format that would be ideal.

My approach is: use what's available. If it's available, more and more people 
have an opportunity to discover what good surround sound that's more than an 
SFX button on a receiver can do, and with that demand can build up. The more 
demand, the bigger the catalog, the bigger the catalog, the more commercial 
interest to make things better, i.e. to eventually provide a better delivery 
format than a stereo container. That's what I mean with baby steps. Start with 
what's available now, instead of waiting for the glorious future that never 
comes, because people try to skip a few steps at the beginning.
Also, UHJ opens the door for guerrilla tactics, i.e. sound engineers with a 
passion for surround can make UHJ mixes for people who ask for a stereo mix, 
because UHJ is stereo compatible. So surround mixes can slide into popular 
items without explicitly being asked for by the producers or artists. If they 
like the mix in stereo, they won't care/notice that it's actually UHJ.

 Write to Apple that they should publish 5.1 (and  maybe  .AMB files etc.), 
 and forget about old compromises.

No, because there's no interest in pushing something without perceived demand, 
particularly if it's something that's too complicated to explain to a 
non-technical audience in a sound bite.

 (You can continue to promote UHJ, but I am sure this won't fly because you 
 say people ideally would have to record via soundfield mics. If you mix a UHJ 
 recording from spot mics, you also could mix to 5.1 ...)

UHJ, 5.1 are delivery formats. What matters is the recording and mixing 
technique. If the 5.1 mix is done with an ambisonic panner, then the resulting 
product is G-Format, and thus acceptable. If it's done with pan-potting, it's 
an abomination, or if one's friendly, just an SFX, but certainly not proper 
surround sound.

 Frankly, who cares about the 3 dozen high-end surround recordings being made?
 
 
 This is 

Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 30 Oct 2012, at 06:24, Peter Lennox p.len...@derby.ac.uk wrote:

 Am I missing something? - for mobile use, wouldn't B-format to binaural be 
 better than UHJ?
 Dr Peter Lennox

Of course it would. Do you know of a mobile playback device with multi-channel 
audio support, multi-channel audio market place, and a binaural decoder?

Lacking that, putting UHJ encoded stereo into iTunes, Amazon, CD-Baby, etc. is 
easy. And an audio playback app with UHJ-to-binaural is easy to place in to the 
Apple/Android app stores.

It's not about technical superiority, but about what can be done in the main 
stream market place. I'm not interested in lab solutions and technology 
demonstrations, I'm interested in what works for millions of iOS/Android users 
RIGHT NOW.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 29 Oct 2012, at 20:56, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Oh yes, go to Apple and look if they listen to your ideas, and let others do 
 their stuff instead of doing some promotion for some stylish, fahionable 
 campany offering super slim products.

You make my point: they won't listen, at least not at this point in the game.
But that's exactly why it's futile to advocate lab type stuff, and stick with 
what's available to the mass market now. 
The mass market right now offers exactly two things:

a) stereo audio
b) custom apps though the various app stores.

And that means that any mass market solution must at this point be stereo 
compatible and may employ a custom playback app made available through the 
various app store channels.


 (Samsung and Amazon sell also a lot of smartphones and tablets, by the way. 
 If it i just about numbers, Samsungs sells actually more mobile phones...)

I use Apple as an example, because it's the dominant company in this field, 
while the rest are imitators and followers; not leaders. Who sells more devices 
also doesn't matter, what matters which devices are used. And if you e.g. look 
at the web traffic statistics you'll see how clearly Apple dominates that 
field. Apple is also the company with the bargaining power. So if they see 
surround as the future, they can make that future happen. Therefore, getting 
surround sound into their platform by means of a Trojan horse (like e.g. 
putting UHJ-encoded material into the iTunes store) is a start on that path.

 I am really angry about these postings. Look for surround in your local Apple 
 store, and if you find somen give us some news about. Otherwise, Apple and 
 their fashionable products are offtopic. (I don't see any relationship to 
 this thread, and even not to this audio list.)

You're angry at reality. I'm not making these things up, nor do they constitute 
my ideal world. But I'm willing to face the reality and ask which small steps 
can we take to get from here to there by infiltrating what actual consumers 
use, rather than being preoccupied with lab experiments and boutique recordings 
that cater to a bunch of enthusiasts.
Nobody who matters (i.e. average consumer) is interested in a dorky 
head-tracking headphone setup that makes him/her look like a Borg from Star 
Trek.
Headphones are accessories that need to be fashionable, because people know 
they are going to be seen in public wearing them. That's reality. Get used to 
it. That's why stuff like Beats by Dr. Dre sells (cool DJs have them) and 
nobody would want to be caught dead wearing top-notch studio head phones.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 28 Oct 2012, at 22:34, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 When Ambi VLC happens, I predict the re-surrection of UHJ.  Simple 2 
 channels will remain the most important distribution format in the forseable 
 future.
 
 This is real surround sound? Why not Dolby Surround...:-D

Despite a lot of stupid badmouthing, UHJ works, Dolby Surround does not; and 
things like SACD, DVD-Audio etc. have been sunk effectively by the cost of 
playback systems and the greed of the record industry which was unable to read 
the signs of the times (more things competing for the same little bit of 
disposable income) and thus insisted on premium pricing rather than at price 
levels that would have pitched the new formats as CD replacements.

As I said countless times before it's about REALISTIC AMBIENCE, I'm not trying 
to train my sniper rifle on any musician while listening to music, so I could 
care less if the localization isn't as accurate as some full B-format or HOA 
recording as compared to the real layout of the people. 
I wasn't at the concert, and 99.99% of listeners weren't there either, and 
nobody knows or cares if the first violin was indeed 2 feet to the left of 
where we think it is.

What realistic people care about, that there's a distribution channel for 
stereo, and that UHJ is stereo compatible, meaning that the audience is bigger, 
and the few people who are interested in surround sound actually have a chance 
of getting a reasonably sized catalog of stereo recordings that are also 
surround compatible; and for the foreseeable future, that's as good as it's 
going to get, because the music industry doesn't produce music for less than 1% 
of the market.

So you get some stereo compatible music, or you get nothing. Frankly, who cares 
about the 3 dozen high-end surround recordings being made? For the most part 
they are esoteric pieces, and rarely do they have the type of world-class 
musicians that major labels attract, and even if they did, I don't care to 
listen to the same 50 recordings over and over again.

Surround sound will not progress as long as the people involved refuse to be 
part of a process that on the commercial side takes baby steps, and instead 
insist on certain minimal standards that constitute too big of a leap of ever 
being considered by commercial interests, both in the music industry and in 
consumer electronics.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 28 Oct 2012, at 03:11, Richard Lee rica...@justnet.com.au wrote:

 This will be a lossy compressed format probably based on the public domain 
 Vorbis.

Unless things have changed a lot, last I checked lossy compression messes up 
phase relationships, and that would be an issue for things like UHJ, which as 
long as portable stereo players with limited battery life (and thus limited 
CPUs), is the only viable, because stereo compatible, distribution format.

At this point in time, not only is most music listened on mobile devices, most 
music is even purchased on mobile devices, and that's strictly a stereo (or 
maybe binaural) world.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Patent application: Data structure for HOA

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Please not! He who is happy with lossy compression is hardly a candidate to 
have a properly set up surround system, much less one suitable to Ambisonics. 
Lossless compression is OK, even desired, as an option, preferably something 
that's freely licensed and enjoys commercial support e.g. ALAC

Sent from my mobile phone

On 28 Oct 2012, at 03:11, Richard Lee rica...@justnet.com.au wrote:

 This will be a lossy compressed format probably based on the public domain 
 Vorbis.
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Re: [Sursound] [OT] FB etc. (was: Re: Trans-Dimensional Portal)

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Hm...

On 8 Oct 2012, at 23:19, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote:

 Very much off topic is what follows.
 
 Just as a point of information, I think Hitler's election
 did not depend on fraud. I think he actually did have
 a lot of popular support at one point . Why is a complex
 question, but I believe he did, though of course
 he was not above fraud if fraud was needed.
 
 Yes, when my children used to come home from 'ra-ra'
 civics classes, I used to pose the question: In 1945, of
 Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Truman, which were elected
 as leader in a democratic election?

Well, I'm not sure where and how you take the idea that I said his election was 
a fraud. When I wrote about flaws in election laws then the fact that there was 
no minimum number of votes a party needed to get representation. As a result 
the parliament was split up among dozens of parties, allowing one strong party, 
the one with the strongest faction, to form the goverment without a proper 
majority. Also other laws e.g. the ability to dismiss the parliament, etc. 
weren't written with abuses in mind. But laws should always be written that 
they anticipate abuse and prevent it, they shouldn't be fair weather laws that 
are good only as long as the government itself is good and honorable.

I only mentioned him as an example of laws and government power that is seen to 
be good to be turned into the opposite when things go bad, and that therefore 
the power of the government, and particularly its access to information about 
the people must be severely curtailed. 
For the same reasons I'm against the data vacuuming on the internet I'm against 
income taxes: it gives the government too much information about individuals. 
Things like sales tax are anonymous, and they fund the government just as well, 
without the government having what amounts to a personality profile and dossier 
for each person alive within its claimed jurisdiction.

However, as for Hitler: he did have a bunch of support, but in the only free 
election in which one could vote for him and others, he got only about 30% of 
the vote, and of these a lot were what in todays terminology would be protest 
votes similar to people casting a vote for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, because 
they were fed up with the bickering and inability of the established parties to 
get things done. These 30% made him the strongest faction, which is why he got 
to form the government, but he was far from EVER having the majority of Germans 
behind him. He was however to surprisingly quickly consolidate his power by all 
sorts of means, psychological, legitimate and illegitimate, but all effective, 
and thus quickly became the undisputed Führer, a dictator that had free reign, 
and thus elections after that point were the same farce as elections in Syria 
today, or Russia under Stalin. It's these elections that gave the impression 
that all Germans were Nazis, but that's just as little true as that 98% of 
Syrians support Assad... The idea that even a majority of Germans were for 
Hitler is a myth that doesn't want to die that is partially old war propaganda 
and part bad history lessons.

 The point here is not personal anecdote but that the
 corruption of the search engines is attached to the commercial
 world. When one gets to something outside the commercial realm
 things work quite well. In the same way if you search for
 complex domains
 , my book with Kim and Krantz on the subject
 also pops right up. Because there is NO MONEY attached!
 (or only a pittance!). What has happened is not I think
 political corruption(yet) but just commercial promotion.
 It tends to creep in everywhere and it drowns other things--
 when there is a simultaneous occurence of the commercial and noncommercial.

Agreed. The thing however is, that if there's any potentially commercial 
interpretation of the query, that drowns out any answer that doesn't have a 
commercial interest attached to it.
As a result, for many things I used to hunt for on google, I now search on 
Wikipedia, but that narrows the breadth of the results considerably.

 Shameless plug :
 There is something called the WWW Virtual Library that aims to
 give expert overviews of particular subjects on the Web.
 (It actually started (by TBL) as a catalogue of the whole Web
 (e.g.
 http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html).)
 Finding volunteers (and fighting off the commercialisation
 attempts) is though increasingly difficult ;-(

I will have to give this a try. Sounds interesting...


Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] Internet communication

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 9 Oct 2012, at 11:40, Ben Bloomberg b...@mit.edu wrote:

 What will be interesting to see is whether this whole facebook thing
 will evolve like AOL, compuserve, etc...

That's what I hope. But with ever more companies thinking they have to tie into 
Facebook, use Facebook login as credentials instead of creating accounts on 
their own servers, etc. that's progressively more difficult.

 Already, many people are working on distributed social networking.
 Where the AOL walled garden could completely track you and was full of
 ads, eventually people began to use POP, IMAP and SMTP in other
 programs for email. Now there are protocols and services like diaspora
 and tent.io hoping to do the same thing for social networking.

P2P is the way to go to destroy all these internet monopolies...
We need a bazaar, not mega-malls.

 As far as NAT and centralized services go, people my age still host
 their own boxes. NAT doesn't really stop that. The fact is most
 households still have their own public IP.

Well, of course, they must have a public IP. But usually assigned by DHCP, 
constantly changing, etc.

 That's sufficient to get just about anything you need.

If you're willing to rely yet again on third parties, like DynDNS, Apple's 
Back to my Mac, etc.

 IPV6 is coming, but its not going to
 change too much (in my opinion) because people are now afraid of the
 open web. That's where you get attacked and can't secure any
 communication. It's easier to have your own kingdom behind NAT where
 you don't need to worry about running Samba (or windows boxes for that
 matter). It's like each household becomes its own datacenter.

That's the misconception that NAT = Firewall. NAT naturally acts like a 
firewall against unsophisticated attacks, but it gives a false sense of 
security, because there are plenty of ways around it, if need be. A good, 
well-configured Firewall is a must, with or without NAT.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] Trans-Dimensional Portal

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 7 Oct 2012, at 16:53, John Leonard j...@johnleonard.co.uk wrote:

 I'm strictly non-Facebook and I'm afraid I'm not going to change my views, 
 even for Ambisonics.

Ditto. I use FB, but in an extremely limited way, and I refuse to do apps, 
games, likes and any of that crap.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Domestic Concert Hall

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 8 Jul 2012, at 13:10, Daniel Courville courville.dan...@uqam.ca wrote:

 AFAIK, there's no HOA IRs out there. As Fons said, you can
 upsample/upmix/uporder 1st order B-Format IRs with Harpex-B, but, even
 then, there's not many B-Format IRs around.

Apple's Logic's SpaceDesigner reverb used to come with a bunch of B-format IRs.

I mean, one really doesn't need that many, if all one does try is to create 
some realistic sounding ambience. If one wants to do auralization, one will 
likely have to either create a whole set of IRs for all location-listening 
position permutations, or synthesize them with appropriate software.

The latter would be something that would be pretty cool: an add-on to 3D 
modeling software, that gives objects not just optical surface properties, but 
also acoustic ones. Then, in addition to cameras/light sources in the scene one 
could also place microphones and sound sources in the scene, and computer, in 
some sort of impulse wave tracing IRs to match that modeled environment, real 
or imagined.


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Re: [Sursound] Chasing flies with ambisoinics?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

The problem is, a sound sources as close to your ear as a mosquito is 
essentially a mono signal on one ear, you practically hear nothing on the other 
ear.

That's pretty much impossible to do with anything than a headphone setup, or 
some phase cancelation while your head is clamped down such as not to move.

So the realism gets lost on things that sound loud without being loud, because 
they are so damn close to an ear.

I wonder if there's a formal specification as to the distance and volume of 
objects that can be reasonably accurately modeled with a speaker array given 
the constraints of the human head size.

Ronald

On 30 May 2012, at 14:29, Augustine Leudar augustineleu...@gmail.com wrote:

 Thats probably it - but if it had been quieter it wouldnt have been heard
 at all or rather it would have sounded like a distant bee .  The thing is
 when an insect flies really close to your ear its a really loud almost a
 physical sensation .I was trying to get that effect when I fly or mosquito
 flies really close to your ear and you brush it away.   I would be
 difficult to get those sort of pressure levels any quieter from a
 loudspeaker on the other side of the path - Under the circumstances I was
 prepared to accept a one foot fly but to be realistic its not going to
 sound anything like real life without WFS or something similar (Im all for
 the training a fly solution myself) .
 
 On 30 May 2012 18:24, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote:
 
 On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 02:10:22PM +0100, Augustine Leudar wrote:
 
 but anyone listening carefully would have heard a fly about 1 foot high !
 
 This magnification effect has been reported many times.
 I wonder how much it has to do with playing back at too high
 levels. We do associate LF energy and size. Too much of it
 and the source 'must be' big.

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Re: [Sursound] Waveplayer - 16 chnl SD-card audio device

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

For predecoded audio properly dithered and almost-normalized 16-bit is 
perfectly adequate; I'd be more worried about the jitter from a bad clock than 
about the limited wordlength.

Sent from my mobile phone

On 23 Apr 2012, at 10:00, Dave Malham dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:

 AS you say, great for installations, Ambisonic or not - I could really have 
 done with this device a year ago for a non-Ambisonic project! It's a pity it 
 doesn't do 24 bit audio as this would make it more attractive still. Still, 
 at that price...I presume the 200 Euro is for the multichannel version with 
 the splitter board and two 8 channel 
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Re: [Sursound] Waveplayer - 16 chnl SD-card audio device

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

One could play predecoded Ambisonics anywhere there's a power amp designed to 
take analog inputs from multichannel DVD/SACD players; which might be useful 
for demos where a decoder is impractical or impossible to hook into a 
preexisting setup.

Sent from my mobile phone

On 20 Apr 2012, at 21:29, Eric Benjamin eb...@pacbell.net wrote:

 That is a pretty cool project.
 
 Having said that, I don't know what I would do with one.  As it stands it's a 
 2-channel player, but it's possible to get a 2-channel player for less than 
 that.  If you expand it to 8 or 16 channels, then it's unique, but I still 
 don't 
 know what I would do with it.  I suppose that if I were to go to someone's 
 home 
 or facility and they  had 8 or 16 speakers but no computer hooked up to them, 
 then it might be a good way to interface with that system using a minimum of 
 hardware.
 
 Now, if it were able to right to the flash instead of reading from it, that I 
 would find interesting.  An 8-channel pocket recorder.  I need one of those.
 
 Eric
 
 
 - Original Message 
 From: Jan Jacob Hofmann j...@sonicarchitecture.de
 To: Sursound List sursound@music.vt.edu
 Sent: Fri, April 20, 2012 11:54:29 AM
 Subject: [Sursound] Waveplayer - 16 chnl SD-card audio device
 
 Dear list,
 
 I was pointed to a device, which is able to play audio-files of up to 16 
 channels without the need of a computer as a stand-alone device. It is 
 basically 
 a SD-card player and I wonder, if this might be interesting for some on this 
 list. The price is about  200,- Euro, which makes it really affordable. The 
 file 
 has to be written onto the SD-card by the use of a computer and a usual 
 card-reader/writer, though.
 The link is here:
 
 http://www.waveplayer.de/
 
 I even talked to the person developing it and he said, that higher sample 
 rates 
 for multichannel might be featured in one of its next software-updates, as 
 this 
 would be no technical problem to provide this.
 
 I am quite curious what people on the list might think about this device and 
 if 
 there are even experiences or test results about it.
 
 All the best,
 
 Jan Jacob
 
 
 sound | movement  |  object | 
  
 space
 sonic architecture   |site: http://www.sonicarchitecture.de
 spatial electronic composition  |  higher order ambisonic music
 
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Re: [Sursound] audio point / audio plenum

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 19 Apr 2012, at 19:53, Martin Leese martin.le...@stanfordalumni.org wrote:

 umashankar mantravadi umasha...@hotmail.com
 ...
 apart from
 clean reproduction of reverberation, i note the speakers do not have to put
 out much power - compared to the same recording converted to stereo and
 played from a conventional pair of speakers. is this a dataset that could
 sell ambisonics?
 
 The same was true of the Hafler circuit (which
 I used for 18 years), so it is unlikely to be the
 killer app that sells Ambisonics.
 
 For those unfamiliar with a Hafler circuit, see:
 http://members.tripod.com/martin_leese/Audio/HaflerCircuit.txt

Class D amps, done properly, are both very high-fidelity, and about an order of 
magnitude more power efficient, than e.g. a Class-A amp. Unfortunately, the 
Audio snake-oil sales people manage to convince customers that unless you can 
fry eggs on your amp and it has a 2 square-foot, half-inch-thick brushed 
aluminum front plate, it's not a he-man amp...
...so reduced power uptake is not going to sell Ambisonics, at least not in the 
traditional audiophile circles. Maybe a green-audio angle could be used to get 
a different sort of clientele excited and asking about Ambisonics.
And of course, a green/alternative/acoustic/folksy kind of audience might also 
appreciate a more realistic ambience of corresponding music than the typical 
classic-rock or multi-mic-classical-music enthusiasts.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] audio point / audio plenum

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

I wonder if it's not simply a matter of a stereo spread control as one would 
get with an stereo to MS to stereo conversion, where in the MS state, one can 
vary the width of the stereo signal.

If we don't assume that someone tries to spread a mono signal, but has a stereo 
signal and is simply playing with the focus of that signal for artistic effect, 
then that may work.

It would also explain the knob I remember seeing on some old tube radio, where 
there was a balance wheel and a plenum knob. Been ages, though, so I wouldn't 
vouch for remembering this perfectly correctly.

So it would be equivalent to what some mixing desks have: a stereo width 
control, and a left-right control, that would be consistent with what the 
passage says about controling the movement between the spakers (left right 
control) and point to plenum (stereo width control).

That would be my best guess, unless someone comes up with a better reading.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Why Ambisonics Didn't Become A Standard, OT: Spatial Music; Low Cost Speakers

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 Apr 2012, at 04:12, David Pickett d...@fugato.com wrote:

 At 19:44 15/04/2012, Len Moskowitz wrote:
 
 A lot of stuff, with which I agree, plus:
 
 Ronald Antony talked about the cost of good speakers being a barrier:  ... 
 and anything halfway acceptable is on a good sale at
 least $250/speaker.
 
 This has changed in the last ten years.  Good speakers today are acceptably 
 inexpensive: around $75 to $175 per speaker channel.  Have a look at:
 
 Pioneer SP-BS41-LR ($149.99/pair) - 
 http://www.stereophile.com/content/pioneer-sp-bs41-lr-loudspeaker
 Wharfedale Diamond 10.1 ($350/pair) - 
 http://www.stereophile.com/content/wharfedale-diamond-101-loudspeaker
 NHT SuperZero 2.0 ($198/pair) - 
 http://www.stereophile.com/content/entry-level-10
 Boston Acoustics A 25 ($299.98/pair) - 
 http://www.stereophile.com/content/boston-acoustics-25-loudspeaker
 PSB Alpha B1 ($279/pair) - 
 http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/507psb/index.html
 Infinity Primus P162 (or older P150 and P160, or newer P153 and P163) 
 loudspeaker ($298/pair) 
 -http://www.stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/1007inf/index.html
 
 All of them have been reviewed on Stereophile's web site.  Most of the 
 reviews include a nice set of measurements.
 
 This is an impressive list.  Only one caveat: bookshelf speakers need to be 
 mounted on stands in order to be close to optimally placed, which increases 
 the system price and probably diminishes the Wife Acceptance Factor.  One 
 reason wny I went for the BW DM603s.


Maybe I'm a bass fetishist, but as nice as many bookshelf speakers sound, even 
relatively cheap ones, they don't go low enough. By the time you add stands and 
a subwoofer, you're easily above the price range I said you have to consider.

Still, it's good things are coming down in price somewhat. My strategy for 
years was to hunt for good speakers being discontinued, and then snap them up 
at close-out sales. This works well, because speakers really don't get 
outdated. Currently listening to music on a pair of AR90 from the early 80s 
which I refurbished, and they sound better than things that sell for well in 
the four digits range today, and are truly full-range. I wish I had a second 
pair, that would be a nice Ambi setup.

Ronald



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Re: [Sursound] Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 15 Apr 2012, at 15:57, David Pickett d...@fugato.com wrote:

 At 19:14 14/04/2012, JEFF SILBERMAN wrote:
 
   I'm thinking that the 99% own flatscreens by now.
 
 Is that really so?  My tv wont die. I dont use it for anything than videos, 
 but I see no need to replace it simply because it takes up a lot of space.

Well, there's also the issue of picture quality and energy consumption (direct 
and indirect, because in the summer people often crank the AC to get rid of 
heat, a significant portion of which is generated by TV, Computer, etc.).

LED backlit LCD screens save considerable amounts of power over CRT and Plasma 
screens.
Of course, once we get OLED it will be another incremental savings over the LED 
backlit stuff.

But of course, resource use is also energy, so it becomes a balancing act 
trying to guess the best life-cycle for resource optimization.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] audio point / audio plenum

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 15 Apr 2012, at 11:07, Gregorio Garcia Karman ggkar...@musicologia.com 
wrote:
 I found a reference in a musical text of the 1960s originated in the UK that 
 mentions the terms audio point and audio plenum perhaps in reference to a 
 technique that would be able to control the spread of a single source in the 
 stereophonic image. Do these terms ring the bell of anyone here?

I have on occasion seen a plenum control on old tube radios, and wondered 
what exactly it's supposed to do. 

Maybe some sort of balance control: width and direction?

Posting the text passage might help disambiguating the use of these terms in 
context.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] [OT] Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

This is getting rather off-topic, but...

On 15 Apr 2012, at 23:02, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote:

 This is very unlikely to be true, that one can justify
 getting a new TV to save electricity for the sake of the world.
 To save on your own bills will also take a very long time.

 
 People seldom do the arithmetic on this. When the first
 gas crisis occurred(in the 1970s) I did some calculation
 of how long it would take to recoup the purchase price
 of getting a more fuel-efficient car. After that, I kept
 right on driving the car I had--it was going to take forever
 in terms of the lives of cars.

This is a matter of degree. It's also a matter of ecology vs. economy.

There are many things that are cheaper, but not environmentally sound, which is 
also one of the problems with greenhouse gas emission trading: it's in some 
cases profitable to generate bad stuff, then destroy it, and then sell the so 
obtained emission credits, than not generating the bad stuff in the first place.

So obviously, since the production and disposal/recycling of a product has an 
energy and carbon footprint, too, it would be foolish to throw out a brand new 
CRT and replace it with a LED TV to save the planet. On the other hand, if 
you have an aging CRT, that eventually you plan to replace, then when to do 
this can very well be based on energy cost, particularly if indirect energy 
consumption is taken into account, too. And of course, it depends how much TV 
you watch. If all you do is watch the evening news, then there's little point. 
If you have a waiting room, and the TV runs from 7:30 till midnight 
uninterrupted, it's a different story.

So it's a matter of degree and math, whereby the almighty $ doesn't necessarily 
reveal what is the most ecologically sound moment to switch devices, only when 
it's the most economical moment, and the two, unfortunately, are not congruent.

 Saving energy is good. Stop having children--that is where
 the real energy and carbon footprint is.

True, although that's generally not a problem in 1st world countries where 
populations only remain stable through immigration, and otherwise would be 
declining.

Anyway, this is taking quite a detour, because all I was saying that there are 
other considerations, besides the lower amount of space taken up by a flat 
screen TV that make people switch, among them picture quality and energy 
consumption. So I didn't single out the latter, just pointed out that these two 
are additional factors besides less space, and a more fashionable look of the 
device.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 14 Apr 2012, at 04:46, JEFF SILBERMAN ambis...@pacbell.net wrote:

 The solution lies in getting the home/spec builder industry to integrate 
 in-wall loudspeakers at pre-specified locations (including ceiling) in the 
 21st century media room which room will become the new normal much like the 
 kitchen has certain de-facto features/standards which are now taken for 
 granted.  In the fullness of time, multichannel audio in the home ultimately 
 will prevail because it is the last frontier.

That suggestion may apply for the 1% of people, not for the 99%.

More than half the people in the US live what in Europe people would simply 
call a ghetto, and of the rest, a lot of people are on their way to descend 
into that level of wealth, given that wages under the new union contracts are 
not sufficient to sustain what one would call a middle-class life style with 
secured retirement.

To stick to your kitchen mataphor: the 1% have custom cabinets, Sub-Zero 
refrigeration units, Wolf or some high-end European appliances. For the rest, a 
kitchen is simply a room with a sink, a super-cheap electric stove and a 
second-hand fridge. They also don't have a laundry room, they have to go to the 
Laudromat with their dirty clothes, and I'd venture to guess that people rather 
invest in their own washer and drier than into a media room of the 21st century.

For a technology to succeed, it can't just target those who lead the gilded 
life.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 14 Apr 2012, at 16:47, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 
 
 UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo 
 track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or 
 surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version 
 ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. 
 None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. 
 No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT 
 works.
 
 
 No, it didn't work.

That's just a plain lie. Obviously I can listen to a UHJ encoded CD or radio 
transmission as regular stereo, and if I have the equipment/software, I can 
also decode it into surround.
It works, I've heard it, I have the UHJ CDs that I can (and often have to) play 
back as stereo.

 UHJ will (mostly) be heard as plain stereo,

So what? That's the entire point. Selling UHJ encoded material requires hardly 
a change in the distribution channel, and requires no change at all for the 
consumer, unless they want to explore the surround sound feature. The latter is 
something people can explore at their leisure, as time and budget and equipment 
allow. But there's never a choice to make about which track to buy, which track 
to sync, what information to strip out to reduce size. There are also no 
choices about which versions of a track to produce, which versions to bundle, 
etc. because there's always only one mix, and one product, it only can be 
listened to in different ways.
This is the path that provides the least options, meaning the least confusion 
and the least overhead; and that's always the winning path in any business 
that's consumer oriented.
This is NOT an engineering or technical product, nor is it a professional 
product, where people might like and want options and choices.

 and then there  might  be a few issues. (Mathematically-logically, it is 
 impossible to press 3 channels into 2. You will have some artefacts if 
 presenting surround sound in just 2-channels.)

The artefacts are not significant. They are certainly less of an issue than all 
the artefacts that arise from lossy compression, and people by and large don't 
care or notice either.

 Surround reproduction requires more than 2 speakers, say: at least 4. (Even 
 decoded UHJ, so to speak.)

And? Did I ever say anything different?

 If speakers are crappy, surround won't be enjoyable with any system. :-)

Did I say anything different? The thing is FOA sounds just fine with 4 
speakers, and 4 decent speakers are a lot more affordable than 6, 8, or more 
decent speakers. The way the world economy is going (stagnant wages combined 
with inflation in the rich countries, and rising wages in poor countries, 
which means global income averaging), people will in inflation adjusted terms 
have less disposable income for tech gadgetry in the rich countries, and may 
be barely get to the point where they can afford entry-level systems in the 
poor countries. That means stereo systems will already be considered 
expensive, and something that requires four speakers will start to push the 
pain envelope. Forget 6 or 8 speaker setups, these are a luxury for an upper 
crust of high-income or high-networth people, and they won't sustain a mass 
market.

On 14 Apr 2012, at 16:58, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 
 
 So who cares about bandwidth and storage? But even if these other issues 
 were moot, bandwidth and storage remain at a premium, because my iPad holds 
 only 64GB, and the iPhone's music download over 3G or 4G has a rather hefty 
 price tag.
 
 
 Yes, but your next iPad will hold 256GB (for example), and if Apple doesn't 
 want to offer this somebody else will do.

That doesn't make the cost much lower. SSD prices, although they have come down 
quite a bit, are still prohibitively expensive for large capacities. A 480GB 
SSD still costs well over $1k, a 480GB disk drive you can get for $50. That's a 
factor of 20, and it's not going to go away that quickly.

Besides, bandwidth is a separate issue: a lousy 2GB data allowance costs $30 or 
more in the US.
In Austria, where mobile data is globally speaking dirt cheap, 1GB is about €1 
when bought in bulk, but even so, transmitting large sound files would cost as 
much to transfer as the purchase price of a track would end up being in e.g. 
the iTunes store. So for mobile devices, bandwidth costs matter greatly.

 But for mere interest: How do you listen to surround on your iPad? Cos this 
 question has to be asked, sorry for my ignorance.:-D

Binaural decoding would be the way to go. Besides, the iPad ends up in the dock 
when at home, which is hooked up to the power amp. An iPad with amp is a 
complete entertainment system, for those who haven't noticed that fact. What is 
missing is software, and that's why convincing companies like Apple to get

Re: [Sursound] Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 15 Apr 2012, at 02:14, JEFF SILBERMAN ambis...@pacbell.net wrote:

 Are things really that bad? I need to get out more often!  I'm thinking that 
 the 99% own flatscreens by now. If a homebuilder is going to place an 
 electrical outlet on the wall suitable for mounting a flatscreen, he might as 
 well put in suitable-located outlets for in-wall loudspeakers as determined 
 by the location of the flatscreen.  As rooms shrink in size and skrink in 
 number, I foresee the media room as the hub of all internet, entertainment 
 and telecommunications of the future.  Since living space will be at a 
 premium, a wall-mounted flatscreen and in-wall loudspeakers will become all 
 the more advantageous.

Lots of people do own flatscreen TVs, largely because they have become dirt 
cheap at the peril of the display manufacturers running huge losses.

However, hardly anyone will have special outlets for these TVs, that's custom 
home stuff, i.e. 1% material. Most people have the flatscreen on top of a 
dresser, TV table, whatever.
People combining their TV with some BOSE mini-cube speakers think they are 
high-end.

A big factor in getting people to buy TVs these days are games. Even rather 
poor people with kids will get a Wii, PS, or XBox Kinect because it allows them 
to entertain their kids and their friends at home, which is still cheaper than 
trying to pay for all sorts of other activities.

The issue is, anything that's solid state keeps getting cheaper. But speakers 
are electro-mechanical, and their price really hasn't come down much over the 
years. Today, good, relatively powerful and clean class-D amps could easily 
power at an affordable price a surround sound system, but getting a set of 
decent speakers unless you're a champ at bargain shopping is not easy. And if 
people have to choose between a bigger screen and better speakers, I think the 
screen will win most of the time...

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 13 Apr 2012, at 04:08, Stefan Schreiber st...@mail.telepac.pt wrote:

 Steven Dive wrote:
 
 
 
 IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't  clearly worth promoting along with up  to 
 3rd order G-format decodes for 5.1/7.1 setups for home users.  Basically, 
 get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's  homes, then get 
 on with full 1st and higher orders.
 
 Steve
 
 
 Steve, Anthony:
 
 In which sense is UHJ and superstereo a viable alternative to 5.1 surround, 
 if 5.1 is clearly better than any 2-channel system can be?

Because it's NOT better. 99.9% of 5.1 mixes SUCK because they are pan-pot BS. 
0.1% maybe use Ambisonic panning to do the mix, and they may be great, provided 
your setup is matching exactly the setup for which it is pre-decoded, at which 
point it is barely better than UHJ, shedding some matrixing constraints, while 
adding issues of irregular speaker arrays. Chances are, a 5.1 surround mix is a 
4.0 in reality, using only 5.1 distribution.

Further, as I said, 90%+ of 5.1 installations are not suitable for music 
playback anyway, because of the fact that the speakers are neither full-range, 
nor even matching in tone coloration. Without excessive room EQ and speaker 
compensation, phase is all over the place, and any moving sound changes 
character as it goes from front speakers to side or rear speakers, because they 
are typically different and cheaper speaker models.

None of that matters for a bit of sci-fi whoosh or action flick shooting, it's 
however useless for music.
So as far as my experience goes, the assertion that 5.1 is better than UHJ 
Stereo or 4.0 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics is plain wrong. 

 You should introduce something which exceeds the existing solutions, not 
 going back to something which fits into the stereo distribution chain. We 
 already had this.

Because that's still the only thing we have, the stereo distribution chain. A 
new technology needs to get the foot into the door. Nobody is going to make a 
speculative investment costing massive amounts of money, for an unproven, 
no-demand system. The only way to get it in the door is through guerilla 
tactics.

Quality doesn't matter, convenience and simplicity do. Why do you think MP3 
trounced AAC, which in turn trounced CD sales, which again are leaps and bounds 
above DVD-Audio and SACD?

Only AFTER surround music is common can one address quality issues, just like 
only after online music was established, slowly the cries for better quality 
were raised, and the bit rates went up, and DRM was removed. According to your 
line reasoning, online music distribution cannot possibly be successful until 
it's lossless audio without DRM, but the reality was different. People bought 
lousy 128kbit/s compressed files encumbered with DRM, over better quality and 
DRM-free CDs, because it was SIMPLE and CONVENIENT.

UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo 
track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround 
version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on 
the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One 
file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for 
consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works.

 I have written that you could decode a 3rd order .AMB file on a 4 or 6 
 speaker home installation, for example ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order 
 components. 8 speakers would be even better, but less is still possible.

And I have said that none of that matters, because no musician in the world, 
except some esoteric avant guard musicians with a cumulative audience smaller 
than the number of members on this list is going to go through the cost and 
trouble of doing HOA productions.

The only Ambisonic productions you're going to see are the ones that Tony 
Fatso Miller (and similarly unknown people) can do in their basement studios 
for some garage band that scratched together $500 to finally get a 
professional demo CD made. That sort of production is where the vast majority 
of music originates. Even if you go up three notches, do you really think the 
producer of Madonna's MDNA album has the slightest clue about HOA? You might be 
able to get such industry people to toy around with one extra channel and go 
from a LR or MS setup to a XYW setup, provided they can ship regular CDs that 
sell millions of copies. If they can mention in the liner notes, that as a 
special bonus it is surround encoded for playback on systems capable for that, 
then that's an added bonus, and that's ALL you're going to get until 100 
million people or more have Ambisonic setups at home and ask for more. It is 
exactly these things, where e.g. some hard core Madonna fan would want to
  hear the album the way it was meant to be heard that will get people to buy 
a decent 4.0 setup, and spread the word.

Nobody is going to have 6 or 8 speakers in the house, 

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 13 Apr 2012, at 10:07, Jörn Nettingsmeier netti...@stackingdwarves.net 
wrote:

 On 04/13/2012 03:49 AM, Robert Greene wrote:
 
 While the mode of expression is even more emphatic
 than my own, RCFA is to my mind right all up
 and down the line. Talking about 3rd order is
 just castles in the air. As a theoretical mathematician,
 I spend most of my life building castles in the air.
 But one ought to know that that is what they are!
 
 you know, for every email you guys write about this tired old topic, i have 
 _set up_ and _calibrated_ a higher order ambisonic system, and believe me, 
 that's way more exciting.

Exciting in the same way as people spending massive amounts of money on speaker 
wire and listening to the same recording over and over to decide if the CD 
player sounds better with a magic brick on top, or without

 can you please stick your heads out the window eventually? it's 2012, 
 bandwidth is ridiculously cheap, storage even more so [1]. there is 
 absolutely no valid argument to be made against very high orders indeed for 
 production and archival. get it in your heads that there is a difference 
 between what the consumer uses and what the production format is. this is 
 what ambisonics is all about: scalability. you get to keep your meridians and 
 your four quad speakers, and everyone can just live happily ever after.

None of that matters:

- there are globally speaking between zero and none studios that even 
understand the concept of higher order ambisonics
- there are between zero and no artists who ask for their works to be produced 
in HOA
- there are between zero and none record labels that will pay the extra expense 
for a HOA production.

So who cares about bandwidth and storage? But even if these other issues were 
moot, bandwidth and storage remain at a premium, because my iPad holds only 
64GB, and the iPhone's music download over 3G or 4G has a rather hefty price 
tag.

The reality of music, in 2012, isn't a desktop computer with cheap hard drives 
attached to it, that's so 90s, its a wireless, low-power portable device with 
expensive SSD storage and expensive always-connected wireless networking.

So yes, even despite all the other cost factors and hurdles that speak against 
a system of the complexity of HOA, bandwidth and storage still matter, or 
should I say, matter again?

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Could you explain to me this phrase:

 Amibsonics (i.e. FOA) is fabulous for AMBIENCE but, alas, not for  MUSIC 
 (due to the lack of frontal emphasis) and c'mon . . . we all know  it.

For one, why would I want frontal emphasis? The whole point of Ambisonics is 
that it does NOT have any emphasis, that things can be whereever.

If one might have a complaint, then that UHJ might HAVE a frontal emphasis, but 
then again, that doesn't matter with most kinds of music.

Again, we're not trying to shoot virtual musicians blind folded. It's about 
creating space in a small-ish living room, what you might call ambience, which 
you admit it's great for. So then what's the problem?

Clearly I and many of the people who even know about Ambisonics never heard 
anything but FOA, e.g. I was convinced of the technology having listened to a 
bunch of Ambisonic UHJ encoded recordings on a Meridian system, and comparing 
them to stereo playback. I also listened to stereo recordings played back in 
SuperStereo, and the conclusion was the same: vastly superior listening 
experience.

On 13 Apr 2012, at 17:09, newme...@aol.com wrote:

 Ronald:
 
 Wrong. They would want it, if they ever heard it. 
 
 Sorry.  I've heard surround and it's just not good enough to  matter -- for 
 MUSIC.

So how can you unilaterally decide that this isn't worth it, when there are 
plenty of people who by the very experience were convinced of Ambisonics?

How many of the people you claim have decided FOA isn't worth it, have 
expectations that don't matter to the average music listener? e.g. I'm not 
interested in the opinion of a professional musician who complains that the 
string section isn't exactly where it was during the performance. I'm not 
interested in the opinion of some Audiophile geek with a recording of someone 
walking in a circle clapping their hands complaining that the motion perceived 
isn't as uniform as the person was walking in a circle. All these things don't 
matter at all to the enhanced euphonic experience FOA provides during playback 
on a half-way decent 4.0 home setup.

 
 I've heard Dark Side and I've heard Kind of Blue . . . and most of the  
 rest of the SACD and DVD-A releases.  Some are fabulous, some are not but  
 none of it was enough.  Good try.  Experiment failed.

Most of that stuff has really nothing to do with FOA, because that to a large 
degree was 5.1 junk, with old-fashioned pan-pot mixes.

If you're trying to say that ANY surround sound isn't good enough for music 
unless it has oodles of speaker channels, HOA and height information, then you 
might as well say there will never be surround sound good enough for music in 
the home, because the bar you set is too high to ever be surpassed in a home 
listening environment for the foreseeable future.

 I've recorded with Tetramics and I've set up an HSD 3D system, on which I  
 enjoyed the 3RD DIMENSION of music -- height -- but none of this is  enough.

Maybe you should just decide it's not for you, and let the rest of us enjoy a 
less than perfect world. 

The way you talk reminds me of some of my friends who are single, because no 
girl is ever good enough for them, they will keep finding flaws even if they 
have a super model in front of them. If these women are not good enough for 
them, that's fine, they can remain single, but they should stop being spoilers 
for all the rest of us who enjoy women (and FOA) the way they are (it is).

 That's why the HOA debates happened.  Smart people with well-trained  
 ears KNOW that FOA isn't good enough.

Elitism pure. I don't need someone else's smarts nor their well trained ears.
As a matter of fact, IQ tests claim I'm well above average in smarts, and given 
that I can hear a good portion of bats in flight, I'd say my hearing isn't the 
worst, either.
I'm sick and tired of other people deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy because 
of their perceived sense of superiority and qualifications.
If I and many others of the few who ever even had a chance to listen to an 
Ambisonic setup enjoy the improvements in listening pleasure then that's plenty 
enough reason for this technology to exist, because the people who don't like 
it, like you, are not forced to listen to it. They should just be quiet and 
wait 500 years until maybe their perfect world manifests itself.

 It has nothing to do with MAG or the British government or bad timing or  
 bad business decisions -- it doesn't *improve* the listening to MUSIC enough 
 for  people to care.  

Yeah, right. That's why Meridian keeps investing time and money into the 
system, that's why the system was invented at all etc. 
Let's face it, Dolby surround, matrixed, which is clearly inferior to even 
FOA/UHJ did have a success in the market, because the right people were behind 
it, and it lasted until Dolby pushed the next greatest thing (AC3), etc. Dolby 
understood that these things go incrementally, even though they chose a 
fundamentally inferior approach to the 

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote:

 First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that
 one can't go up in order, just forget about it all.

Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not only 
listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st order 
horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints.

So maybe you should forget about it all, because there are plenty of people who 
enjoy that which you claim one should forget about. It's these sort of phrases 
that killed the potential adoption of Ambisonics a few years ago. The nice 
thing, people keep outing themselves...

It's exactly this elitist attitude that keeps the ball from moving. 1st order 
is thoroughly enjoyable, and were it not for the not-so-smooth DACs maybe some 
other digital sins that Onkyo did in it's 808 receiver, I'd be a happy camper 
with that setup, but the sound quality of that device can't compete with a 
clean stereo amp, so it's surround vs. good sound. Some day, I'll fix that by 
using an old computer as a processor, and some high-end DAC as converter, and 
then I'll have the best of both. And I'll still massively prefer 
UHJ-1st-order-Ambisonics on four speakers over plain stereo.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 12 Apr 2012, at 23:05, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote:

 On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 10:47:04PM +0200, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 On 12 Apr 2012, at 22:27, Fons Adriaensen f...@linuxaudio.org wrote:
 
 First order definitely isn't good enough. As long a you insist that
 one can't go up in order, just forget about it all.
 
 Tell that Meridian, and all their customers who have enjoyed immensely not 
 only listening to horizontal-only 1st order Ambisonics, but also to 1st 
 order horizontal-only Ambisonics crippled by UHJ matrix-encoding constraints.
 
 First order is certainly fine for classical orchestral music,
 and I enjoy that as well even without Meridian's help.

It works also for all sorts of other music that wants to create swirling sound 
scapes, etc.

We're not trying to help blind people to target shoot by sound, we're 
essentially looking for artificial musical sound effects and natural sounding 
ambience.

 But that will reach a minoriy classical music lovers audience
 only. And first order fails rather miserably for anything else
 compared to 5.1 which is what people already have and can compare
 with.

Essentially nobody listens to music in surround format, particularly not in a 
mass market. Also, I rather have less precise spatial resolution than what 
might be achievable with 5.1, but have it sound natural, not the sound out of 
speakers that most 5.1 productions end up having.

Besides, G-Format would also end up being 5.1.

 It won't produce a stable front channel for movie sound,
 nor has it the the required spatial definition for effects that 
 work outside a very small sweet spot.

Movies have no reason to switch to Ambisonics. The visual dominates the ear, 
and so there's no need for natural sound, because we're absorbed by the 
movie, and the movie studios are not going to change their production workflow 
or their love affair with DTS/Dolby anytime soon.
So Ambisonics for movies is utterly irrelevant, at least until such point that 
it has proven to be a resounding success in music.

 And what's the problem with
 five or seven channels anyway ? 

Three things: cost, cost, and cost.

The cardboard speakers that ship with affordable 5.1 systems are not suitable 
for music, and anything halfway acceptable is on a good sale at least 
$250/speaker, which means with four speakers you're at or above $1k, add a 
decent four channel amp, cables, speaker stands, etc. and you're well above the 
typical consumer price level already.

This isn't about what grant money can buy in a computer lab, this is what a 
waiter, someone making $1500/month, etc. i.e. the typical iPad/AppleTV buyer 
could afford, not what a doctor or lawyer would buy if only they had a clue 
about technology.

 This has nothing to do with 'elitism'. Try selling 256-color
 computer displays to today's consumers. Won't work even if they
 would do fine for 99% of all practical computer applications.
 It's too late for that. Technology has moved on, and people
 know it.

Technology hasn't moved on. 5.1 is 4.0 plus a crappy center speaker that has a 
totally different tonal quality and never blends with the other four lousy 
speakers, plus a subwoofer to make up for the fact that the other speakers are 
lousy. Four full-range speakers in a 4.0 configuration is better than what 99% 
of people have in their homes, and cost near what they could possibly afford. 
To talk about higher channel count is totally disregarding economic realities.

Further, it's also not about Madonna or some stars who have the budget and 
access to engineers who might actually understand what they are doing. This is 
about the majority of musicians who record themselves, or who go to some local 
dude with a computer and analog mixing desk that sounds horrible but looks 
impressive to have their music produced. These people are not going to ever 
understand spherical harmonics, nth order something or another. They can 
intuitively grasp front-back, left-right and mono. They will be able to make a 
stereo CD (UHJ), and have an extra gimmick to sell: now you can listen to your 
CD in surround sound.

Nobody is talking about stable images, just as little as The Beatles stereo 
recordings were Blumlein stereo. But they can make sounds swirl around, and 
people who do location recording can get a decent ambience.

All of that is better than what is accessible to most consumers, musicians, and 
recording studios today. It is breadth that will get something like this going.

It's not the best that is winning, but the most accessible. Once limited 
Ambisonics is sufficiently adopted, then it's time to show that there's more to 
this. You're not going to get people to mix single tracks with the channel 
count that e.g. 2nd order requires unless there's already established demand 
for surround music. There are also no decent tools around, no DAWs with 
built-in support for 2nd or 3rd order Ambisonic production, and they won't be, 
because nobody is going

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 13 Apr 2012, at 00:53, Steven Dive stevend...@mac.com wrote:

 IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't  clearly worth promoting [...] Basically, get 
 UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get on 
 with full 1st and higher orders.

Amen. Can't feed a baby with a steak.

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?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 07:31, Jörn Nettingsmeier netti...@stackingdwarves.net 
wrote:

 On 04/02/2012 06:33 PM, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 
 On 2 Apr 2012, at 17:57, Eero Aroeero@dlc.fi  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.
 snip
 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] Can anyone help with my dissertation please?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 16:21, Michael Chapman s...@mchapman.com 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] 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

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 18:03, Marc Lavallée m...@hacklava.net 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

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:26, Rev Tony Newnham revtonynewn...@blueyonder.co.uk 
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] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 Apr 2012, at 22:15, Richard Dobson richarddob...@blueyonder.co.uk 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 4 Apr 2012, at 01:13, Sampo Syreeni de...@iki.fi 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 server, i.e. iTunes. At least that's the 

Re: [Sursound] OT: Spatial music

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 2 Apr 2012, at 20:53, newme...@aol.com wrote:

 But, in the context of this list and this thread, these larger forces  
 must also be taken into account -- which, ultimately, lead to the perfectly  
 understandable reasons why Ambisonics could never and should never become a  
 mass-market technology.

I tend to disagree, because there is a difference between technology and 
content.
I totally agree that content mass-market is ever less dominant, because the 
digital age allows for efficient internetworking of sub-cultures, and therefore 
their ability of carving out niches that collectively eat away at once dominant 
mass-culture.

However, just as much as MP3 and ripping of audio destroyed the mass-market of 
LP/CD sales, the massmarket of MP3 players and MP3 files still was created. 
Ambisonics would have the role of MP3, not the role of prerecorded music sales 
from record stores.

The key thing would be to get a major player to include Ambisonics in their 
line up, and that isn't happening as long as the purists bitch and whine about 
how at least 2nd, better 3rd order Ambisonics is a must, because the 
complexities and channel count just don't justify the effort given that there 
is no proven demand.

Something like UHJ, except for being tied to CDs, and G-Format (with an ability 
to extract B-Format for transcoding into different speaker layouts, but en 
inherent 5.1 compatibility) are the only meaningful choices when attempting to 
popularize Ambisonics, but both of these are sneered at by the very experts 
that would have to be cooperating with industry heavyweights to get things off 
the ground.

For these reasons, snobbery and academic purity, Ambisonics won't go anywhere 
in the next three decades, unless there's a major shift in attitude.

Some people still don't understand that one doesn't feed a baby with a steak. 
Get things going, and when there's a certain amount of market penetration and 
people start noticing limitations THEN you can tell them about 2nd and 3rd 
order, because by then the concept has sunk in and people say: I want the 
better version of what I already have.

Did Apple wait until they can ship a universal LTE Retina-Display iPhone and 
iPad? No, we're on the fifth generation iPhone, and still not there. But some 
people here are not interested in any solution unless it's a perfect solution, 
and that unrealistic thinking is the biggest roadblock to progress.

And then, of course, another problem with Ambisonics is, that it's British...
...and the entertainment industry is US-American, and consumer electronics 
(aside from Apple) is Japanese-Korean, made in China/Vietnam.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] problem with jconvolver on osx

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 30 Sep 2011, at 09:38, Fons Adriaensen wrote:

 The reason for this is the crippled implementation of POSIX
 semaphores (sem_t) on OSX:
 
 1. Only named semaphores (i.e. having a file system name)
   are available.
 
 2. The sem_init() function does not work.
 
 3. The sem_getvalue() function does not work.

Has this been officially reported as a bug with Apple?

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Fwd: Bass Problem in crosstalk cancellation

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 10 Jun 2011, at 10:43, Paul Hodges wrote:

 --On 10 June 2011 10:26 +0200 Bo-Erik Sandholm 
 bo-erik.sandh...@ericsson.com wrote:
 
 Case B : Use a steady state 50 Hz signal and slowly pan it to new
 locations.
 
 Of course, as this involves the level from each speaker changing, the speaker 
 feeds will still have the higher frequency components.  Indeed, I presume 
 they would appear even if you physically moved the speaker.

To prevent any speaker fading artefacts: how about placing a speaker on a rail 
behind a curtain, and then just move the speaker. Obviously, the challenge 
there is to make the mechanism that moves the speaker silent enough that the 
listener doesn't pick up e.g. on squeaky wheels ;)

Another thing that might be worth testing: placing the listener's body in some 
sort of stiff suit or bucket that only reveals the head, and then repeating it 
with the listener wearing light clothing.
The issue here: how much of low frequency localization is done with the ears, 
and how much by feeling the impact of pressure waves on the body. Particularly 
at concert-level volume, I think once can feel from what side the bass hits 
the body...

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Let me be blunt: there's a lot to be said about HOA in theoretical terms, it's 
wonderful, exciting, yet totally irrelevant:

When it comes to localizing sounds, when I sit in the sofa at home, I'm not 
trying to shoot the second violin by sound, I just want a natural sounding, 
enjoyable soundscape that's not some cheap, artificial reverb/delay/hall effect 
thrown in by some more or less skillfully programmed surround processor.

UHJ with a 4.0 setup is already PLENTY GOOD ENOUGH for that purpose. It sounds 
a lot more natural and thoroughly enjoyable on my ancient Onkyo receiver than 
any stereo or surround effect. What makes it less than enjoyable are the 
quality of the processing, DACs, etc. when compared to better gear.

What sold me on Ambisonics? A properly set up Meridian system. Guess what that 
did? Play back UHJ Nimbus CDs, and listening to Stereo in Super Stereo mode. 

TOTALLY GOOD ENOUGH. And still leaps and bounds better than all that 5.1 crap 
(aside from G-Format)

Again, we're not trying to shoot the musicians, so if localization is off by a 
few degrees, who cares, as long as it sounds realistic? 99.999% of the time the 
listener wasn't at the recording, and certainly not at the microphone position, 
so there's no way of telling if the localization is off or not.

And the talk of 3D compositions by avant-garde composers is equally irrelevant, 
because their works make up about 0.1% of the music for sale, which is what 
I as a consumer at home care about. This isn't about setting up some setup for 
some government arts fund sponsored special event with 64 speaker channels and 
some high-brow avant-garde compositions. It's about a typical garage band, 
local chamber ensemble, etc. setting up a mic in the performance space and 
being able to produce something more natural sounding than some pan-potted 
stereo recording.

We're not doing lab experiments, we're LISTENING TO MUSIC.

Similarly, what does a SoundField mic output? A/B format. Now translate that 
into 5.1. That's what's a realistic production flow. People are not going to 
have Eigenmics or stuff like that, and only some things will be synthesized 
sounds that can be generated in HOA. 

Now, if some DAW plug-in that does sound field manipulation uses INTERNALLY for 
processing HOA and it results in better results, that's OK and totally 
transparent to the user, as long as it's A/B-Format input and 
B/G/UHJ/binaural-Format output.
The last anyone wants to see is a zillion tracks of audio the meaning of which 
isn't understood.

So again, realistic sources and production is going to be B-Format base, mostly 
even tossing the Z-axis.

And that's good enough for now. 

I'm not saying don't do research, just like because cotton shirts are good 
enough doesn't mean one shouldn't do research in synthetic fibers gear suitable 
for polar or space missions. But don't try to clothe the entire planet in 
ultra-performance fiber clothes, if most people will be just fine with cotton.

1st OA is something that can be grasped by the average engineer, recording band 
member, etc.
1 channel for the mono sound, plus three differential channels for the X, Y and 
Z axes. That's about as intuitive as it gets without being totally wrong. Now 
try to explain HOA to your average musician. Haha!
You really think HOA is going to take off if the average garage band member 
can't wrap their head around it?

So if the Ambi-Snobs could come back from their space mission and set foot on 
the ground for a while, then 1stOA actually would have a chance.

It's not that the battle for 1st OA was lost, it was never ever fought, because 
between the UK government licensing, academic research, etc. it never even 
registered on anyone's scale outside a small circle of people in academics or 
into high-end British audio gear who stumbled over it reading a Meridian 
instruction manual.

Once 1st OA is as widely used as stereo is today, THEN it's time to push 
further. One doesn't feed a baby with a steak!

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 3 May 2011, at 13:08, Richard Dobson wrote:

 My proposed application is not music listening as such, but sonification of 
 particle collisions in the LHC. In the data, Z is the beam axis, and the most 
 interesting stuff has high transverse momentum, i.e. left right up down 
 across the beam axis. I can do a great deal just with horizontal surround 
 (the most obvious way of sonifying bipolar data, of which there is a lot), 
 but most collisions are  very obviously 3D in space. Normally, jets are 
 formed in symmetrical pairs e.g. one hard left, one hard right, but recently 
 they have found some instances where the jets were not exactly in opposite 
 directions, indicating (possibly) some new physics. So it will be important 
 to tell if two sounds are exactly opposite (180 deg in effect), or at a 
 narrower angle. There may be situations where being able to rotate the 
 soundfield in the classic B-Format way in  order to choose an alternative 
 listener orientation would be useful.

Sure, in such a scenario you'd of course want Z-axis info, too. But then you 
may also need a more precise and stable localization. Naive guess would be 
something like two rings of six speakers at different horizontal levels would 
be a reasonable minimum.

Here's a question for the experts:

If one considers a cube arrangement as a minimum for 3D playback, which could 
be interpreted as two rings of four speakers at different horizontal levels, 
then why would one choose a cube over e.g. two rings of four speakers that 
are not only at different horizontal levels, but rotated by 45deg against each 
other. In other words, a setup that in projection wouldn't be a square, but an 
octagon?

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Minim AD7 for sale

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 29 Apr 2011, at 19:15, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

 but you are right, we are still heavily in the DIY + slightly kludgy
 realm. then again, most ambisonics fans will be, too. have to :)

That's large part of the problem of lack of adoption. And a lot of that is to 
blame on the Ambisonics fans themselves: the snob's won't accept anything but 
2nd or higher order Ambi, and no software or electronics maker is seriously 
going to go to that effort for something as iffy in terms of market acceptance.

Instead of pushing for the perfectly pleasant 1st order listening and recording 
experience, and thinking of 2nd and higher order once that step has 
successfully been completed, every effort to get someone to accept basic 
B-format and UHJ support, results instead of cheers in jeers, and bitching and 
whining how anything but HOA isn't good enough, until any interest in even 
supporting 1st OA is evaporated.

I sometimes wish these people could be locked away in a closet and released 
only after 1st order Ambisonics is sufficiently accepted by the audio community 
at large and the consumer electronics and computer software makers.
Maybe we might get somewhere that way.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Anyone seen/heard about this?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

From the description, yes. Except they claim the filters they use for doing so 
to be novel and vastly superior to what e.g. the Ambiophonics people use.
If it's true, I couldn't say, just what I got from perusing their site.

On 11 Mar 2011, at 12:27, Bob Katz wrote:

 Is this another variation on crosstalk cancellation?

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Re: [Sursound] AMB Playback

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 24 Jan 2011, at 13:04, Justin Bennett wrote:
 I use an RME fireface audio interface. It has a built in Matrix mixer which
 allows you to route and mix any software output (or hardware input) to
 any hardware output. Because you have quite fine control over the
 mix levels and you can flip the phase, you can set up a simple decoder in it.
 (no shelf filters though!)

The same could be done with the various interfaces from MHLabs which a few 
people here on this list are using. Probably even incl. the shelf-filters, 
provided one knows the proper coefficients, etc. since the DSP platform into 
these interfaces is rather versatile.

(On some of their equipment they are running a special now for a few days, to 
celebrate that they just won the TEC Award for that device...), but their 
lower end devices would do the trick, too:

http://www.mhlabs.com/metric_halo/

Ronald



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Re: [Sursound] Why do you need to decode ambisonic/b format signals ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 23 Jan 2011, at 13:50, dave.mal...@york.ac.uk wrote:

 On Jan 23 2011, Eero Aro wrote:
 
 
 In my opinion, you can skip the on-going discussion about UHJ, it's more or
 less academic. UHJ was developed in the 1980's, at the time when vinyl LP
 and FM radio were the most important carriers. UHJ isn't needed anymore.
 
 
 Unless, of course, you are a musician who wants to use vinyl (or even 
 cassette!) for aesthetic reasons which is what's driving my re-looking into 
 UHJ (ps Fons - nice analysis, very useful!). In fact, I'm only glad that 
 there are no stereo cylinder players as I'm sure someone would want that too 
 - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10171129

I tend to disagree strongly. DVD-Audio, for greed of the record companies, has 
been a still-birth.
SACD hasn't fared much better, and I will not buy any for religious reasons, 
because a) I won't buy a medium I can't back up, and b) it's provably an 
inferior and less efficient way of storing audio when compared to PCM.

So that leaves for main-stream music distribution online and CDs, and the shift 
is going more towards on-line distribution and less to any multi-channel 
capable disk carrier.

So for most commercially relevant music, it's the choice between 
lossy-compression Stereo in the form of MP3 or AAC/MP4 files, or lossless audio 
on a silver sliver called CD.

This means, until lossles multi-channel audio is available on CD-Baby, Amazon 
downloads and last but not least iTunes music store; the most viable way of 
distributing music is UHJ encoded Stereo on a CD, just like Nimbus records did.

G-Format on DVD-Video is an alternative, but it has all the disadvantages that 
come with a format that was meant for video rather than audio (navigation, 
channel bandwidth, etc.) and it works only if your speaker layout matches the 
5.1 ITU setup for which it was pre-decoded. With more and more people going 
7.1, 6.0, etc. the number of variations one would have to put on a disc becomes 
ludicrous.

So we're back to B-Format, or for better or worse UHJ-stereo.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Why do you need to decode ambisonic/b format signals ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 23 Jan 2011, at 23:52, Robert Greene wrote:

 Of course this completely ignored the fact
 that in blind testing years ago,
 everyone preferred cassettes of vinyl
 to vinyl itself(which ought to have
 told people something about the recording
 industry's recording practices).

Sounds like they were using DDM vinyl ;)

Besides, some people like euphonic distortion like tape saturation.
But such things should always an effect used during production, not a 
side-effect introduced by the delivery medium. So even if cassette sounds 
better it's still worse, because it should sound like what was mastered, and 
if the cassette sound is the target sound, then that's how the master tape 
should sound. It shouldn't be introduced in playback.

Therefore insert favorite four letter word all better sound that's 
introduced by the medium or equipment. Anything that doesn't exactly sound like 
the original master is sounding worse, by the very definition that it diverges 
from the master. If you don't like how the master sounds, yell at the mastering 
engineer, don't screw with euphonic playback equipment.

Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Time-Stretching/compressing ST350 Recordings?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

There is a plug-in by iZotope called Radius, which is a plug-in specifically 
for Logic and adds their algorithm to the range of algorithms available in 
Logic's Time Machine. (Name collision here, no relation to Mac OS X time 
machine).
iZotope is very cutting edge in their processing, and that plug-in was always 
at the top of all the shoot-outs of similar products.

Ronald

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Re: [Sursound] Line Audio QM12i

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

The link to XLD on the page your first link points to needs to be updated...
I'll have a listen later. Thanks for posting.

Regards, 

Ronald

On 17 Jan 2011, at 15:42, Daniel Courville wrote:

 People interested in the QM12i microphone can take a look at this page:
 http://www.radio.uqam.ca/ambisonic/comparative_recording_2008.html.
 
 The files from the recording session are available here, 24/48, wavpacked:
 http://www.radio.uqam.ca/ambisonic/2008/.
 
 The files are from a SoundField ST350 and a QM12i, unprocessed.
 
 Take 1 is in a TV studio, take 2 and 3 are in a chapel. Take 1 and 2 from
 both mics are the same length so you can easily compare them in a DAW. Not
 sure about take 3.

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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Anyone using their QM12i QUAD for a Nimbus-Halliday type setup?
It would seem that with the four cardioids stacked up on top of each other, the 
rest would just be creating proper sum and difference signals, or running the 
whole signal through a proper convolver.
Right?

Ronald

On 17 Jan 2011, at 04:48, Bo-Erik Sandholm wrote:

 http://www.lineaudio.se/linemicdata.htm
 CM3 is extremely well regarded here in sweden, and a won a recent comparision 
 in 
 The stockholm based Ljud tekniska sällskapet 
 
 Regards
 Bo-Erik

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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

Well, four cardioids at 90 deg. angles could be used to create both two fig8 
signals at 90deg from each other, plus an omni by summing all four. So wouldn't 
that already be more or less account for horizontal-only B-format?

Ronald

On 17 Jan 2011, at 08:08, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

 On 01/17/2011 11:44 AM, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 Anyone using their QM12i QUAD for a Nimbus-Halliday type setup? It
 would seem that with the four cardioids stacked up on top of each
 other, the rest would just be creating proper sum and difference
 signals, or running the whole signal through a proper convolver.
 Right?
 
 if you want to use cardioids, your best bet will be three at 120° angles.
 i've played around with such a setup (recorded by fons with three km184), and 
 i found it works quite well. haven't had the chance to use it myself yet.

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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 17 Jan 2011, at 09:20, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

 On 01/17/2011 02:51 PM, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
 Well, four cardioids at 90 deg. angles could be used to create both
 two fig8 signals at 90deg from each other, plus an omni by summing
 all four. So wouldn't that already be more or less account for
 horizontal-only B-format?
 
 it would, but so would three, so why waste one?

Easy: because there is a mic with four of them stacked, precisely aligned in 90 
degree angles.
There is no such mic with three capsules at 120 degree angles.
So the three mic solution would require custom mounting, allow for easy 
misalignment, etc.
If anyone can convince them to do one of these mics with three capsules at 120 
degree, it would be a different story.

Also the fig8 is easier to do just in a mixer with a phase flip and sum of two 
signals IIRC.
With fewer signals involved in the fig8 part, it might have better impulse 
preservation and that might help localization; however, that's just speculation 
on my part.

The main reason is simply that this is a mic that can be bought off the shelf 
that seems to ave what it takes and costs well under $1k including cables and 
shipping.

Ronald

PS: thanks for the plot and the math. Might be useful in the future.

 i've played around a bit with gnuplot (hope the attachment makes it through): 
 three cardioids at 120° sum up to a perfect omni, and also to figures of 
 eight (only one given here, for clarity.
 (note i had to cheat a bit with the last two functions, because in polar 
 plotting, there's no concept of an inverted polarity lobe, instead r is 
 negative, which means that both halves of the eight are congruent on the 
 positive side).
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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 17 Jan 2011, at 10:48, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
 ah, i see. didn't catch that this thing actually contains four independent 
 cardioid mikes.

See here:

http://www.lineaudio.se/linemic.htm
http://www.lineaudio.se/qm12man.htm

Price with cable translates into roughly $900. All the processing to get 
B-Format from that can be trivially done in the +DSP setup of a MIO 2882, pair 
of ULN2 or ULN8, all of which I have at my disposal

 QM12i QUAD / Multi Mic (Quadruple cartridges / 12 membranes) 5100 SEK excl 
 VAT/moms (excl. cable)
 This microphone is actually four complete/independent SM3Ls in one body with 
 each membrane angled 90 degrees.
 5 meters of cable (with QM12 multiconnector to 4x XLR wip): 795 SEK excl VAT/ 
 plus moms. Other cable lengths are available on request.
 
   • QM12i picks up true QUADRAPHONIC/SURROUND!
   • Stereo: X/Y.
   • Mono: CARDIOID.
 -Additionally, with the help of a good mixing desk it can also pick up the 
 following stereo and mono patterns: 
   • Stereo: BLUMLEIN (crossed figure eight), M/S, omni X/Y. Recordings 
 can be made Quadraphonically with the stereomatrix manipulated at a later 
 stage, finding out the best settings not before recording, but afterwards. 
 This reduce the risk of mistakes and enables post production perfection of 
 the stereo image/ambience, not possible with standard techniques.
   • Mono: Any pattern between OMNI-CARDIOID-SUPER CARDIOD-FIGURE EIGHT.
 
 SMi / STi / QMi SERIES SPECIFICATIONS:
 TYPE Prepolarized condenser microphone
 PHANTOM POWER 40-52V
 FREQ. RESPONSE 20 - 2 Hz (70-15000Hz +-1.2dB on axis!)
 IMPEDANCE  100 Ohm 1KHz
 SENSITIVITY 10mV/PA (SM3L/ST6L 7mV/PA -44dB
 S/N ratio (DIN/CCIR) 83dB(A)/73dB
 Noise level:11dB(A)
 MAX SPL 130dB
 CURRENT CONSUMPTION 3.5 mA
 CONNECTOR 3 PIN XLR (pin1 GND, pin 2+, pin3 -)
 SIZE 140mm x 47mm / 170mm x 47mm
 WEIGHT 320g (microphone only) 
 
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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

SoundField and CoreSound and also the recently discussed Oktava mics do full 3D 
sound, i.e. with Z component. This one would only do WXY, but if things end up 
being mixed for playback on 5.1 or 7.1 setups, the Z part gets thrown away 
anyway and is only useful for the archival master, just in case the material is 
still relevant by the time delivery with Z becomes useful outside a few 
specialized setups that don't really exist outside of some research labs.

As for the sound quality, that's exactly what I was wondering, and how this 
sub-thread started after some other microphones from the same company were 
mentioned here.

Ronald

On 17 Jan 2011, at 12:09, Pierre Alexandre Tremblay wrote:

 Interesting! Does it actually sound good? compare to a soundfield?
 
 p
 
 Le 2011-01-17 à 16:51, Ronald C.F. Antony a écrit :
 
 On 17 Jan 2011, at 10:48, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
 ah, i see. didn't catch that this thing actually contains four independent 
 cardioid mikes.
 
 See here:
 
 http://www.lineaudio.se/linemic.htm
 http://www.lineaudio.se/qm12man.htm
 
 Price with cable translates into roughly $900. All the processing to get 
 B-Format from that can be trivially done in the +DSP setup of a MIO 2882, 
 pair of ULN2 or ULN8, all of which I have at my disposal
 
 QM12i QUAD / Multi Mic (Quadruple cartridges / 12 membranes) 5100 SEK excl 
 VAT/moms (excl. cable)
 This microphone is actually four complete/independent SM3Ls in one body 
 with each membrane angled 90 degrees.
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Re: [Sursound] good quality low noise yet miraculously cheap cardiod/unidirectional microphones ?

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

On 16 Jan 2011, at 09:28, John Leonard wrote:

 I saw this too, but I noticed that the unit is build-to-order and there's no 
 other information at all that I can find regarding this product, which seems 
 to have appeared in the Octava catalogue four years ago. I can't find any 
 user reports, either, which makes me a bit suspicious of whether anyone's 
 actually used one in anger. 

I guess the calibration would be the issue, otherwise the various A-to-B format 
conversion tools could be used.
Ronald
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Re: [Sursound] Another plugin inquiry...

[Ronald C.F. Antony]

There are ambisonic IR reverbs. So basically, what you'd need to have or 
calculate would be an IR, and then any multi-channel convolving reverb should 
be able to do it, i.e. things like SpaceDesigner or AltiVerb.

Ronald

On 1 Dec 2010, at 18:20, George Kierstein wrote:

 Is the such a thing as an ambisonic delay plugin ?That would be nifty!
 Thanks
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