Sorry for the late answer, I was away for several days... On 9 Apr 2012, at 02:25, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote:
> Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: > >> >> 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"... >> > > I get tired of discussions we already have had on this list, several times at > least... :-) So do I. > 1. 3rd order .AMB format can be decoded to a 5.1 ITU/Dolby setup. (Results > would be clearly superior than a decoding from Ambionics 1st order to 5.1 > ITU. This is because the resolution of 3rd order .AMB fits better to the - > relatively detailled- front resolution of 5.1.) Completely and utterly irrelevant. It doesn't matter what is better, what matters is what's good enough and simple enough that for any reasonably company shipping a product it's cost effective to implement. Nobody is going to go 3rd order, make massive investments in technology, time, and man power, just to have a potential flop on their hand. 1st order is already close to too complex to be realistic. 2nd and 3rd order have no business outside the lab at this stage of commercial utilization of Ambisonics. > 2. You also can decode 3rd order .AMB to (just) 4 speakers. (Even if 3rd > order Ambisonics is "overspecified" if decoded to just 4 or 6 speakers, I > personally don't see any fundamental or even practical problems. This needs > probably some further discussion, but at least this is something < > practically relevant > ... Just a hint for the > "overspecification/underspecification" purists: A 1st order soundfield > recording can be reduced to plain old stereo, or say UHJ stereo. And > Ambisonics 1st order fans usually don't complain if Ambisonics is presented > on an underspecified loudspeaker array of just 2 speakers... ) On can also drill a hole in one's knee cap and pour raspberry sirup into that hole. But why would anyone want to do so? 1st order horizontal-only is about the only thing that has a reasonable chance, it's only one track count more than a regular stereo recording, it looks somewhat familiar to advanced recording engineers who may (if one's lucky) be familiar with MS Stereo or Blumlein setups, and for the rest one can somewhat intuitively explain a mono signal, and left-right differentials and front-back differentials, where already the concept of a differential signal is generally well above the head of just about almost everyone doing recordings. No, the majority of people recording, the people who make it a profitable business that things like ProTools, Logic, Garageband, Cubase, etc. are being sold are NOT people who are familiar with advanced recording concepts. They are neither Tonmeister nor are they Audio engineers. They may be music students who run screaming when they even see something that resembles an equation. These are the people who must adopt Ambisonics, if we want content since without content, there is no market for anything else. So step number one for Ambisonics to get off the ground is that creating content must be a no-brainer. That means something like GarageBand must be able to do 1st-order horizontal-only Ambisonics and spit out UHJ-Stereo mixes. THAT is achievable. Someone's drivel about what one can do with third order Ambisonics not only interests nobody except a sub-set of the people on this utterly tiny and irrelevant mailing list, it drives away just about everyone who might be willing to give Ambisonics a try. > 3. Any realistic 3rd order decoder could also handle 1st order Ambisonics. > This is important, because real-world Ambisonics recordings are > mostly/next-to-always 1st order. Irrelevant, because nobody is going to write, ship, sell, adopt a 3rd order decoder, if they haven't first thought of 1st order to be convincing and worth their while. If Apple had adopted 1st order Ambisonics on their platform, and now you'd ask for a 3rd order decoder, because it's also compatible with 1st order content, then you'd have a point, but we're about 4 decades away from that situation. > The concept of UHJ and G formats is from the 80s/90s, respectively. So what? The concept of Ambisonics is even older. Object-Oriented programming is a concept from the 70s, and Lisp, still one of the most powerful computer languages is a concept that predates Fortran. The beauty of UHJ is, one doesn't have to ask. Anyone who distributes stereo content will distribute Ambisonic content, provided the material is UHJ encoded. For that reason alone, UHJ is invaluable. And it works. The Ambisonic stuff that convinced me of the technology was UHJ encoded material being played back on a Meridian system, with A-B comparison of Stereo vs. Ambisonic playback. No contest. And if UHJ works that well and has that clear of an edge over stereo, then it's good enough to get the foot into the door. Distributing UHJ Stereo in lossily compressed audio files is another story, but it's only a matter of time until lossless compression will show up on the iTunes store or other online music sales platforms. > In the case of G format, height is still missing. (You can't recover height > information from G format.) So what? Nobody has a plus-height setup in their living room, nobody will have one anytime soon, either, because nobody is going to be able to afford more than four decent speakers, and that's the first and primary precondition for Ambisonics to be worthwhile: good speakers in all directions, not two good speakers in the front and some cardboard surround noise boxes in the back and center, like what most 5.1 setups provide. > I personally < do > support that height should be included in any future > suround format above 5.1, especially since you can ignore height infomation > on horizontal arrays. This is actually the way most people listen to the few > existing Ambisonics recordings - height is just left out. Even so, B format > is a 4-channel format, not a 3-channel reduction without height... Which > means that you can offer more than most people would use. It's not what one can offer beyond what people would use, it's about how little can one add to what people have, to create a difference that's worthwhile. People pay the most for the least amount of change, thus the least amount of change is the most profitable for businesses, and therefore that's the route that has to be chosen if Ambisonics is supposed to get off the ground. My iPhone could easily also have a Geigercounter, Thermometer, Remote Control, Cordless Phone radio, etc. in it, after all, if I don't need it, I could just ignore it. But that's not how business is done. Even if all these additions were 100% useful, we'd see them added one-by-one, over the course of several years, each time creating a new incentive for people to get a new phone. So therefore it's not about the most channels, which one then can ignore, it's about the least channels that make a difference, and the least that makes a difference is ZERO, meaning UHJ-Stereo, or G-Format for material that ships as surround anyway. The next step would be ONE extra channel to get us to horizontal-only 1st order. Any other suggestion will make you the laughing stock outside academic circles. > > You could also decode Ambisonics to binaural headphones with > motion-compensation (height included), if motion-compensating headphones > would be introduced into the market. (I didn't write mass market, because > markets have to grow. And currently there are headphone prototypes with > motion-compensation, but no market, or say a very limited market. Probably > they will use some of this stuff for virtual reality/ simulators/ training.) Could, could, could... ...but nobody will. What friggin' geek will wear such monster headphones? 80% or more of all headphones in use are earbuds, and the other 18% are cool-looking DJ headsets. Forget head-tracking, not even close to anything that deserves the word "market", much less "mass-market". Sennheiser manages (barely) to sell the HD850 headphones, and for a while the Orpheus system. Head-tracking headphones? I don't think so. > You could also decode Ambisonics to Ambiophonics, and the 6 speaker variant > Mark (Stahlman) has mentioned before. (Not a hybrid system, BTW.) Again, nobody is interested in what could be done, because it's not going to happen. Too complex, too little understood by the people who'd have to buy it, too expensive, too much investment for the companies involved, etc. etc. > Coming back to former postings of this thread: Of course we don't live in > KANSAS, and the iPhone and iPad are not really mass-market! (Think of > different smallish ecosystems of users, which accidentally buy the same > product. :-P ) Haha. Between iPod, iPad and iPhone the three iOS device groups are dominating the market, the rest is a fragmented mess. > Surround and Apple: > > Apple doesn't even sell 5.1 tracks on iTunes, and there is clearly plenty of > recorded/mixed 5.1 stuff around. Though don't blame the "list" for internal > bickering/infighting when Apple is just not offering < any > surround sound > on iTunes! > (Some other online shops offer surround sound, but remain small.) Of course not, because there's no demand, and because of the storage and transmission costs. That's where something like UHJ comes into play, or maybe a three-channel format, and not your ideas of providing a format that could what nobody would. > G format is 5.1, so no way around some simple facts. Apple doesn't offer any > surround recordings, they never have supported Blu-Ray (being a BDA board > member), and I could find many other examples. It appaently doesn't matter > for the financial health of Apple if they support surround or not. (If it is > about their customers, they frankly didn't care if anyone wanted to reproduce > a BD disc on a Mac "PC" - which clearly has been demanded by a few.) Movies on iTunes do offer surround, and what Apple sells is largely a matter of what people push to be sold. The few surround music productions were designed to milk audiophiles for what they are worth, selling for a multiple of what regular CDs cost, even though the production costs are just a few pennies more. The publishers certainly weren't knocking on Apple's door suggesting that they would sell the album for $9.99 when they were trying to sell the SACD or DVD for $34.99. > So, Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt for Apple, and maybe surround is just > irrelevant. For them... Blu-Ray for music is more than overkill. Besides, the Blu-Ray licensing requirements would destroy the entire OS architecture, by inserting itself in various places, would make requirements that would render the Mac close to useless for professional audio without all sorts of additional hacks designed to bypass the things Blu-Ray imposes, etc. All the issues with Windows automatically degrading audio quality when it "detects" that someone or something "might" try to intercept the bit stream somewhere, are all a direct consequence of the Blu-Ray copy protection requirements. Under Windows Vista it was so bad, I couldn't even play Netflix disks on my GF's laptop, because each time the air conditioner would kick in, there was a small voltage glitch which the computer interpreted as someone tapping into the signal lines, and so with every cycle of the air conditioner's thermostat, the movie playback was interrupted and a copy protection message was put up on the screen. Apple's stance towards Blu-Ray's licensing requirements is commendable, just as it's great that they finally managed to put a few nails into Flash's coffin. > You are also not entitled to install some little program witten by yourself > on < your > iPad. (You have to be protected against yourself, so to speak. > But you might install it from their app-store... ;-) ) You can install your own apps on your own device, just sign up as a developer. You just can't randomly distribute potentially malicious code to arbitrary numbers of strangers. But that's not the issue here. >> There's a reason why there's the old phrase "Shoot the engineer, start >> production"... > > You are welcome... Lucky for you, I'm a peaceful person ;) >> 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. >> > > But would you spend the 20 minutes if Apple tells you to do so? Apple would never tell me to do that, because they understand simplicity (sometimes to the point where they go too far with it.) > Best, > > Stefan Schreiber > > P.S.: But don't shoot the engineers from the Core Audio group, as you/we > still might need them... =-O They are in no danger, for now ;) For Ambisonics to go anywhere, we need first and foremost to keep any higher order stuff in the labs until the first order stuff is established in the market. Second, we need terminology that's not scaring people away. A musician who hears about spherical harmonics either thinks you're talking about "musica universalis" aka "Music of the Spheres", or he high-tails it, because math is scary. There's a lot of theory involved in stereo, too. But people don't think about it, they don't hear about it, because intuitively they think: "I have two ears, so I have two speakers". Ambisonics has to get as simple as that, maybe the pattern: "There's front, back, left, right, so there are four speakers/channels." or something along these lines is what makes Ambisonics accessible, talk about spherical harmonics of various orders will scare people away. Pick a random stranger off the street, and try to tell him why Ambisonics matter. If you can do that with a reasonable fraction of the random people you grab off the street, then you may have the right kind of words to go by, but if you just get a blank stare, then you know you're dead wrong in your approach. On 9 Apr 2012, at 02:30, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote: > 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? Because the OS has most of the required infrastructure in place. It's a matter of content. Getting very close to breaking NDAs: In a Galaxy far far away in a time long passed, there was a beta tester for an audio production tool that has already a variety of surround capabilities, but none for Ambisonics. The beta tester tried to get the maker of that tool to adopt Ambisonics as well, which would have resulted in tens of thousands of copies of a commercial audio production tool to ship with Ambisonics support, which in turn might have put pressure on competitors to match the capability, and it would have lead to a large number of people hearing for the first time about it. >From the tool flows content, and content needs to be sold. If one company both >makes the tool and sells content, there's an incentive to sell content that's >in one way or an another exclusive, plus there's an incentive to have >synergetic relationships between various branches of the company. Unfortunately, when after lots of lobbying, said company finally started to investigate what it would take to do Ambisonics in that audio production tool, all hell broke lose, and everyone wanted something else, and many disparaged 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics as essentially useless (which clearly it is not), until said company rapidly discarded the idea and to my knowledge hasn't thought of reviving it, either. On 9 Apr 2012, at 02:40, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote: > Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: > >> >> 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. > > Eloquent, but clearly wrong. > > (Apple also doesn't support any 5.1 < music > on iTunes.) Because 5.1 is essentially a movies special effects format, which is already evident by the lousy surround speakers that are being sold. For a decent music system, you want the same speakers all around, such that there are no issues with colored sound from various speaker models not matching. The 5.1 setups that use five identical speakers are a rare exception, the ones that use 5 good speakers are even more rare. Also, it doesn't matter what Apple does now, had things been different in the past, things quite possibly would look differently now. After all, Apple has a good track record of "eating their own dog food". If Apple were selling an audio production tool with Ambisonic support, the support for the format would spread to the OS, QuickTime, and eventually iTunes and the iTunes Store. Since such an audio production tool doesn't exist today, there's also no reason for Apple to put up the rest of the infrastructure. > Who is < they >, by the way? The people who are working with HOA?! Some of the people in question have in the mean time sufficiently outed themselves, so I won't have to mention names. Others have since mellowed out, and besides, I don't keep track of names on such matters... On 9 Apr 2012, at 03:42, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote: > Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: > >> 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 scenario for >> the average techno-phile user without a huge budget. The luddites still have >> CD players, but they are going to die out just like the Vinyl and 8-Track >> are slowly sliding towards their graves. >> >> > ------------------------------------------------------------- > >> the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV that gets its data >> stream from a computer server, i.e. iTunes. >> > > iTunes TV/film content will play on every TV, this is just an interface > question. > >> The luddites still have CD players, but they are going to die out just like >> the Vinyl and 8-Track are slowly sliding towards their graves. > > Vinyl doesn't seem to die nowadays, like it or not. > > http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120104vinyl Well, Vinyl isn't dying just like Kodak would never stop making film... ...maybe it takes a bit longer until the retro-is-cool factor is gone, the DJ-craze is over or whatever, but the day will come. Besides, $3.9 million in sales, in an entire year, with most of it being vinyl for DJ scratching (drum & base, etc.). Apple sold 10 Billion songs in less than seven years, with sales accelerating, add to that the downloads from Amazon and others, and for all intents and purposes vinyl is already a negligible factor. Apple currently sells close to 4 billion songs per year, so Apple alone outsells the entire vinyl market by a factor of 1000. > CDs are as valid as iTunes downloads, in fact offering better-quality than > iTunes (AAC) downloads, and you can rip the tracks to any format you want. > (AAC, MP3) > > CD sales have been quite stable in 2011. Again, that doesn't matter. I personally only buy CDs for the same reasons, but I'm a minority and an "old fart". The kids don't think about wasting time going to the music store if a single click can get them the music RIGHT NOW. Most of them have ears damaged enough from the dance clubs that they couldn't hear the difference anyway, and they rather tweet a few useless "news" than spend time ripping CDs. > Anyway: > > Good night, and thanks for the < free > Apple promotion... This isn't about Apple (except for the thing in the past where Apple was looking into Ambisonics), it's about market leaders and technology leaders bringing about change. Apple currently is the pace maker, while most everyone else is just following. A decade or so earlier I might have been talking about Sony, but that company is making billions in losses and shedding tens of thousands of jobs because they were busy infighting and sleeping while Apple provided leadership and now is a dominant player in most of Sony's traditional markets. Amazon isn't in the device market, besides the Kindle, so it's not likely to expect much from that direction, and Google just killed some of their own best technologies because there wasn't a lot of short-term money to be made with them (e.g. Wave). Microsoft is just following, and doing that badly; witness the stellar success of WindowsPhone and Zune... So when I talk about Apple, not because I'm a fanatic, but because currently it's one of the very few trend setters who can get a technology adopted simply by fiat. >> The problem is: who still needs hardware? >> > ... > >> the hardware of choice is something like an AppleTV >> > > I am really confused, by now. :-D If you so please to be... An AppleTV, like any other network media player, is software driven, it's essentially a computer with an audio interface. That's quite different from dedicated hardware like traditional stereo and surround component systems. On 9 Apr 2012, at 04:18, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote: > Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: > >> 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, > > Think again of Blu-Ray (movie) support on MacOS. Is there one? (BR drives are > supported, only the films don't play...) > > Apple is actually - according to my best knowledge - still a "director" > company in the Blu Ray Disc Association. > > BD licensing might be a bag of hurt or not, but there are existing solutions > for Windows PCs. (Historically this is quite odd, as Microsoft had supported > HD-DVD. If Microsoft can support Blu-Ray on Windows, Apple could on MacOS.) The lack of Blu-Ray has different reasons, as mentioned elsewhere. For more on why Blu-Ray on computers really sucks: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/a_cost_analysis.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html > I am also sure that Apple couldn't afford the high licensing fees, even if > they probably would not pay at all... :-D It's not about the cost. Blu-Ray would be FRAND licensed, and if other companies can afford it, it won't break Apple's bank; the bag of hurt is not financial hurt, it's technical hurt, as detailed e.g. in the two links above. > The reason for this is - of course - that Apple chose not to support Blu-Ray, > and to sell films (SD, HD) on the propietary iTunes store. That's an added incentive, but one that came long after BluRay dug its own grave. Had the licensing requirements been different, it would have been easy for Apple to update its DVD player app to also support BluRay. After all, Apple didn't prevent DVD playback, even though it sells movies on iTunes, nor does it prevent CD playback, even though it sells music on iTunes. It's the baseless conspiracy theories that are simply refutable FUD. > Apple is so clearly promoting propietary solutions that you have to be blind > not to admit this. There are other examples. I am actually not complaining > about, but let us keep the facts. > >> it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. > > Oh yeah, they < have > to offer a closed and walled garden. Otherwise things > would not work as PERFECT as Apple users expect... Data formats and user interfaces and applications are three different things. It makes perfect sense to curate apps, and have proprietary GUI, because that's the competitive advantage. That has nothing to do with data formats, which are all open, except those where the content providers pressured Apple into a different direction. But who was who pushed back, and allowed for DRM free music on iTunes, that's universally compatible? Apple! > P.S.: And they care since years for the "best and safest working conditions > at the Foxconn plants", and so on. (Even if evidence and independent reports > tell otherwise. They got some pressure ecently, thanks to NYT and others, but > the problems are actually quite old.) > > But as long as loyal Apple customers buy into the stuff and every excuse, > there is maybe not enough incentive to change policy. Even the NYT admits now, that lots of its initial reporting was based on falsified claims. e.g. the much reported suicides: 13 of 400'000 Foxconn employees, vs. the typical US suicide rate of 11 per 100'000, so the average US person is almost four times as likely to kill themselves as the average Foxconn employee. Yet the press reported it as if suicides due to working conditions were a common occurrence, etc. While the conditions are not what I would like to work in, it's probably some of the best working environments of most of the cheap consumer goods from Asia that our western economies are awash in. Don't even look at things like textile production, shoes, etc. The people there wished they'd work in a factory like Foxconn's And ultimately, the users have just as much to do with it. Who'd be willing to spend an extra $50 or $100 for better wages? Why do you think the whole outsourcing came to be, because penny pinchers rather went to WalMart to buy cheap Asian sweatshop products than more expensive locally produced items. Why is even most of the garlic sold in the US coming from China, when it would quite well grow in many places in the US? To take cheap shots at Apple, as if they had invented the system or were anywhere near the worst players in this game is just ludicrous. On 9 Apr 2012, at 15:59, newme...@aol.com wrote: > In particular, IBM, Motorola, Intel and Samsung (i.e. the world's "largest" > semiconductor shops) have all "gotten over" having Apple as a > semiconductor customer. > > Btw, Apple's shift from Power to the Intel architecture was a direct > result of IBM and Motorola refusing to "subsidize" Apple anymore, whereas > (for a > while) Intel was willing. That is blatantly WRONG. PowerPC was a joint project by Apple, Motorola and IBM IBM wanted to make high-end server chips, and eventually moved from the PowerPC to the Power and Power-2 architecture, and Motorola was interested in embedded controllers, mostly for the car industry. Neither of the other two partners were interested in PC chips, low-power laptop chips, etc. That's why PowerPC's initial performance lead was eventually lost, because the high-end, high-power chips IBM wanted for servers were not useful in PC type devices, and the embedded controllers that Motorola needed were plenty fast enough and didn't require more compute power. Further, with Apple being essentially the only PC-type chip customer of the PowerPC consortium, the chips became too expensive due to the inability to defray R&D costs. That Intel wanted Apple for a variety of reasons, and thus was willing to subsidize the switch in a variety of ways (pricing, technology, preferred access to new chips, etc.) was a windfall for Apple, but hardly at the core of their business. Apple's margins are not that high because they get things that much cheaper than others, but because they manage their supply chain much better, because they produce less crap, and are capable of getting a decent premium as a result. Just about any other company would have fired a designer who suggested to them to make laptops machined from a billet of aluminum when cheap plastic could do the trick, Apple endorsed such an idea, and as a result has machines that are not only much more recyclable, but also run cooler and look like high-class fashion items, and people are willing to pay a price for that, which an HP laptop with some silk-screened "fashion decor" on cheap plastic just won't fetch (and that's without going into Windows and pre-installed bloatware and other things that devalue PCs for the user). Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
