> > > Message: 3 > Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2012 09:21:21 -0700 (PDT) > From: Robert Greene <gre...@math.ucla.edu> > Subject: Re: [Sursound] Can anyone help with my dissertation please? > To: Surround Sound discussion group <sursound@music.vt.edu> > Message-ID: <alpine.lnx.2.00.1204020914100.6...@walnut.math.ucla.edu> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; format=flowed; charset=US-ASCII > > > Re marketing > I am not a marketing expert > but it seems to me that if anyone > had really wanted Ambisonics to succeed, there would > have been > 1 presentations at shows for example. I have > over the years encountered exactly one, by Meridian. Period. > And
Its a question of when you are talking about. There were many presentations in the 70's in US and Europe, but at the time there was very little consumer surround sound around; Dolby stereo and logic decoders was about it. At the time (2 ch UHJ) Ambisonics was criticised for not being like a logic decoded Dolby Stereo. By the BBC. > 2 there would have been low priced or free demo discs > mixed to 5 channels. Zero on that one. At the time BTG was promoting ambisonics there were no 5 channel discs! > 3 Ads for said discs in audio and home theater magazines > zero on that one > 4 attempts to get magazines to write about it, The Absolute > Sound, Stereophile, etc. Pretty much zero on that one, too. look further back into late 70's, early 80's. > > 5 Demonstrations at shows of Trifield and four speaker frontal > stereo. Pretty much zero on that one, too, except for Meridian > occasionally. Trifield (Productions) has never had the budget to do much of that; audio was always peripheral to our business. Our involvement came through my earlier work with MAG. I financed his patents on the multispeaker decoder and also built him some prototypes and gave him some expenses to go to AES conventions. Meridian gave a lot more exposure to 'Trifield' than we could have achieved on our own. > > One really gets the strong impression that the Ambisonics > community has never seriously tried for public attention, > and perhaps did not even want it. Well, you said it, 'community'. As with the hard-core on Sursound now, we all come at it from different perspectives. There is no agreement about what we want to achieve, and why should there be? In commercial terms it would still be uphill to get Ambisonics into consumer equipment. Basically, you have to get through a connection called HDMI. This is limited to 8 channels which have moronic speaker location predications. > > It is really not too late at least for Trifield. If it is really > better, people would respond. (Actually at a Meridian demo I heard, > I thought it sounded worse than stereo. For one thing, > the speakers were not far enough apart so that it sounded too mono--this > sort of thing does not help the cause). It happens. I remember seeing one very successful Ambisonic demonstration on four speakers where one (rear) speaker was later found to be unplugged. > > If this is really a better way to play stereo in the sense that people > like it better, one could demonstrate. People go to audio shows > partly looking for interesting new ideas. But Trifield is one they > practically never encounter. > > This stuff is not hard to set up. It does not even cost very much. > But it never seems to happen. It is not easy to do for those who are most likely to appreciate it ie. those who normally listen to a system based on two decent speakers fed by a decent stereo amp! Geoffrey > > Robert > _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
