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 _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
