Hi,
Generally I totally agree with Ronald C.F. Antony and Robert Greene.
Ambisonics is useful and pleasing, even at first order. Until that
gets out of the starting blocks into more widespread use it will
remain a minority pursuit. I think all on this list would agree that
this is undesirable.
It is scalable, and first base is first order. As Ronald says we need
to make it widely hearable and available for people at all levels to
use. Anyone who takes care to set up home cinema, home studio
monitoring or public address systems effectively can understand the
basics, and these can easily be promulgated. This would promote more
widespread use and content creation.
This doesn't stop anyone with the interest and budget exploring and
using higher orders.
There have been suggestions of using higher order ambisonics as a
production format, with UHJ or first order as a distribution format.
This could be regarded as unnecessary. The Soundfield microphone has
a fairly large user base, and higher order microphones are unlikely
to be widely available and used for some time. Other than such direct
recording nearly all productions are going to involve panning of mono
and stereo sources, and possibly mixing them with Soundfield mic
recordings or even 5.1 (etc.) recordings.
As these productions are nearly all done with DAWs now, it is the
scene description (direction, distance, width etc.) of each source
that is important and already future proof. This can be applied
subsequently to any spatial audio algorithm, ambisonics to any order,
WFS, VBAP, zillion.1, Delay/Amplitude panning etc.
Any software or plug-in that we use now may not be useable in five
years time, and may have been replaced with something else. Any
finished material will survive and hopefully be playable. A scene
description could survive, or could be recreated by careful
listening, much as old multi-track recordings can be remixed and
polished up now.
Ciao,
Dave Hunt
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