Dear Stefan, dear list,
Am 06.03.2019 um 21:16 schrieb Stefan Schreiber:
I don’t want to come over as being too negative about new and
progressive projects, but “still” have some problems with “5th order
recordings”.
Many practical HOA decoders in the wild are currently restricted to 3rd
order. 4th order is seen as Master Format for VR. (Guidelines of VR
Industry Forum.)
Well, it is e.g. a good idea to encode either close mic recordings or
spaced main microphone arrays in 5th order, like ESMA, which goes
without a lot of trouble. The free-and-open plugins under
matthiaskronlachner.com, plugins.iem.at, or
research.spa.aalto.fi/projects/sparta_vsts (i.e. multiencoder or
ambix_encode_i6_o5 or AmbiENC) would allow you to do so.
Would we really need 5th order if the decoders would be a bit more
optimized, by the way?
For large audience area I think it is necessary to get enough angular
separation (in level) in order to somehow preserve the directions.
We listened to the awarded pieces in a system for 300 seats in Cologne(!).
Nothing personal again, but I think you are using rE decoders. This
might be acceptable in the loudspeaker case and using HOA, but applying
headphones and binaural decoders I still would recommend dual-band
decoders. Because you aredefinitively in the sweet spot...
Yes, but no... The newest binaural decoders (BinauralDecoder) show that
5th order is typically not different to 7th, for dense audio scenes it
3rd is also as good as 7th (Lee 2019, AES IAA). Sidelobe suppression
does not appear relevant in the sweet spot of 3rd order and above, as we
could prove by listening experiments in loudspeaker playback (Frank
2017, AES Conv.).
It is anyway easy to try out: the binaural decoder comes without rE
weights and appeared to sound best this way, but there are no formal
proofs done, as far as I know.
(And maybe also NFC, as Aaron Heller might insist.)
If the audience is large, NFC is rather destroying things elsewhere,
while maybe 5% of the seats around the center might get improvements.
Anyway, for higher orders this is better done by bass management.
Of course you could use the 5th order mix as master format, and less in
practice. (The only problem I have with this approach is that even the
eigenmike can’t record 5th order. Of course you can still mix your HOA
main microphone and spot mikes.)
It is as practical as 3-stereo:
We have 30° degrees of angular separation, so very-close-to-stereo
channel separation. At the moment the best we have for the practice with
large audiences and studio. The question is where the practice should
focus to. In my opinion it should include.
For home and studio applications, 3rd order would of course be pretty
fine as well.
And for higher-order spherical microphones 3rd order is pretty fine as well.
All better than first order without slight directional postprocessing
(which can be a static decode and higher-order re-encode of the source
directions! - if the adaptive/parametric solutions don't do their job
well enough).
So maybe all things are just fine, and why not being forward-looking...
(How many 5th order capable playback systems do we have? I mean: on this
planet? I would be surprised if we should “count” more than 100
installations for 22.2, as well... Which probably is used as master
format, accordingly.)
"Forward-looking" would to me mean 7th order, as your P.S.1 :D
- But anyway in our practice in the IEM CUBE and from small tours around
with some of the productions, 5th order is clearly and noticeably better
than 3rd. And I guess it will be satisfactory for a while.
I am in a tough place here, because many people will now show up and <
insist > that FOA recordings would be just fine. “Perfect spatial sound
forever”, so to speak.
Well... not so well for the large-audience situation if used as
puristic-and-only means of recording with little/no post production.
Then, I am afraid, most people will only hear the loudspeakers closest
to them as directions, but not really pronounced.
For some ambiences it works, though, but you can't rely on 1st order
when playing back to 100-200 people. It's a pain, from my experience.
Of course the effort of multi-band for first-order is appreciated, but
it too restrictive in applications. It would be difficult to recognize
the intended qualities to a larger audience, therefore somewhat odd to
play back in an award ceremony.
The guideline saying 5th order however does not mean that one could not
try otherwise. One should be aware then that unprocessed and pure 1st
order might get poorly rated doe to its huge directional blur.
Compass is a hint, but I would first check HARPEX which is probably
easier to use.
Best regards
Franz
(Running away to get some bite, as our British colleagues say...)
Best regards
Stefan
P.S.: 7th order recordings/mixes would have been even better! 😎
P.S. 2: Being more constructive:
Maybe using COMPASS could help to achieve some true 5th order result.
(As long as you can reproduce this...)
Further work (for next year): 7th order?! (Losing patience...)
- - - -
Citando Franz Zotter <zot...@iem.at>:
Dear colleagues & friends,
We are happy to announce that the 5th Int. Conference on Spatial Audio
will host Europe’s Third Student 3D Audio Production Competition,
Sept. 26th to 28th 2019 in Ilmenau, Germany,
https://vdt-icsa.de/en/2019/ .
Call: Students who are interested in 3D-spatialized sound and work on
spatial music, spatial audio productions or recordings are invited to
participate by submitting short works (4min/11min) to the third
Student 3D Audio Production Competition.
There are three submission categories:
(1) contemporary / computer music (11min)
(2) audio drama / documentary / soundscapes (4min)
(3) music recording / studio production (4min);
For the first time, category (1) permits more common
contemporary/academic composition formats of eleven minutes.
The format requirements for preparing a submission and tools to check
are given here https://iaem.at/ambisonics/s3dapc/2019 and of course
you can get in touch if there are questions: <s3d...@iem.at>
The submission portal
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=s3dapc2019
is open until the end of June 2019.
An international jury will assess the submissions concerning the
creative and technical quality, providing feedback to all the
participants of the competition. Based on the resulting ranking, the
finalists will be selected for presentation at 5th ICSA. The finalists
will be notified and requested to attend the finals at ICSA in Ilmenau
in order to receive their award, the jury’s comments, and say a few
words about their submissions.
The finalists' work will be presented during the finals and awards
celebration, played back with powerful hemispherical loudspeaker setup
with about 30 loudspeakers.
Best regards,
Franz Zotter
Matthias Frank
Daniel Rudrich
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Ass.Prof. Dr. Franz Zotter
http://iaem.at/Members/zotter
Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik
Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst
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