On 16 May 2013, at 03:45, Eero Aro <eero....@dlc.fi> wrote: > Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: >> I would tend to differ. If BluRay & DVD-Audio were resounding >> successes, then one could say: heck, just deliver binaural, stereo, >> 5.1 etc. downmixes and not worry about distribution formats, these >> disks have more storage capacity than we know to fill with an album >> anyway. > > There is the word "commercial" in the thread subject. > > I don't think any commercial company would like to use their resources > to produce different kinds of audio format tracks onto a disc just because > it is possible to fill it up. That would increase the production costs but > wouldn't bring too much more money in. > > If they'd like to do that, there would be also binaural tracks already now > on every DVD you get from the shop. > > In my thinking BluRay and DVD-Audio are delivery mediums. > Isn't DVD-Audio past and gone?
That's my point: physical media, for better or worse, is gone. Someone made the point that as far as they are concerned Ambisonics is more of production tool than a delivery format, because Ambisonic productions can be downmixed to various delivery media formats. My point is, physical media is gone. So while in the case of physical media, one can easily (and without significant added cost) downmix an Ambisonic production to 5.1, 7.1, stereo, and binaural, and still ship it on the same media (provided one chooses Ambisonic production behind the scenes), that doesn't hold true in the case of electronic delivery. Once you enter electronic delivery, you'd either have spend a lot more (expensive) bandwidth, and/or sell different versions of the same program material, or *TA-DAH* you use B-format as a delivery format and push the decision in what way to reproduce the material to the end user. In other words, in a world in which physical, disc-based delivery dominates, Ambisonics holds little value as a delivery Format, because current disk formats have so much spare capacity that it's easy to just pre-decode all the potentially interesting playback formats, and be done. One can keep Ambisonics out of the home, and use it strictly as a production too. However, once you enter the digital distribution, where you have billions of downloads, and where user-side disk storage is limited (albeit getting cheaper), that's when you have an economic interest in least redundant data transmission and storage. At this point, just about all the relevant (not talking niche players, but Amazon, Apple, Google, Spottify, etc.) players in the digital music delivery business are restricted to compressed stereo audio. Ambisonic B-format or even UHJ-format delivery has an opening here, provided the bickering stops and a concerted effort is made to lobby the players involved, because for a reasonably moderate bandwidth overhead, these outfits now can deliver a data file/stream that can be played back in stereo, binaural, surround, and the decision can be pushed to the end-user environment. A strong eco-system like iTunes could use B-format with proper software changes, weaker eco systems could use UHJ, and simply have UHJ-capable players, but in the absence of such, would still end up serving perfectly usable stereo files. So, I think, right now, with the demise of physical media, and still rather limited bandwidth and end-user storage, there's a perfect sweet spot to introduce UHJ/B-Format as a delivery for universally compatible audio files/streams. If one could get together a strong community effort, a few major acts providing some key productions to get things off the ground, then that would be a relaunch of it all. Ronald -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4853 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20130516/94cdf15c/attachment.bin> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
