Hi Richard, > Now the attention in previous posts was very much on the phrase "most > sophisticated format", which was guaranteed to wind people up; whereas the > key word is really "available". The UA format is not really available to > ~composers~ to use. The description is very much one for prospective > developers - acquiring wavpack, and one way or another implementing all > those equations (and apparently creating a WAVE file with a large number of > silent channels!).
I really didn't want to get pulled into a defence or argument about ambisonic formats ... but, just to clarify ... the choice to include some empty channels in UA is intentionally designed so that authoring environments don't need to change all the channel routing when working at different orders. The choice of Wavepack was determined on its ability to compress empty channels to take up no space. Wavepack also efficiently losslessly compresses all sound data. Already on these two points UA is far more practical for composers. You only need one setup to work at different orders. UA was actually designed *for* composers. I agree that there are many remaining tools required for it to be *actually* practical for *listeners*. But there's the grab ... I think the ultimate mistake is to think that ambisonics should be a consumer oriented format. (both ambisonia.com and soundOfSpace.com distribute the files as already decoded speaker feeds) That's where so many issues start to creep in. When a consumer gets an ambisonic file then: - the audio player needs to be "smart", it needs to do "work" far beyond what audio players are used to doing - speaker agnosticism is a false benefit ... in reality, ambisonic order choice is largely determined by the targeted speaker array. Note there ... "targeted speaker array" is the opposite of "speaker agnosticism" The way I see it .... Ambisonics is a production format. Etienne _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
