On 2022-04-06, Ulrich Windl wrote:
I cannot for the life of me understand why Atmos exists. Except for
I don't know the theory behind, but I guess they want a format open to
future sound designs (i.e.: how many and where to place speakers).
Third order ambisonic is already nigh correct for a central, static
listener. Especially when augmented with dynamic decoding for specular
sources, akin to the higher order extensions of DirAC. It really does
not *need* hundreds of separate parametric sources. It's just a good
enough description of the central soundfield, taken from any angle.
If parallax was involved, such as in games where you don't stand still,
I could understand the point. But as far as I understand it, neither
Atmos nor AC-4 support anything of the kind. So where's the point? The
selling point is adaptation to different speaker layouts, but high
enough order ambisonic can do that already, 3rd order is well enough for
regular speaker layouts, and no irregular layout is going to work even
for re-rendered specular sources. That's just basic math: irregular
enough meshes don't admit stable quadrature.
Plus in the meanwhile, Atmos is about synthetical, specular sources. You
can't *mic* an Atmos field, but have to *compose* it. Third order
ambisonics on the other hand *is* a technology you can so-and-so capture
from the real world. Plug-and-play with spatial sound, to a degree.
To me it sounds just stupid to bring in all of the "spatial objects"
nonsense, when all it does is to add complexity and weight to the
abstraction.
Similar why DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) encode color in CIE XYZ
(you can encode invisible "colors").
Don't even get me started... XYZ is there because it's derived from the
tristimulus theory at the physical level. Its weighting functions take
on negative values only because the optimum transform to "color" call
for them, and because we want the XYZ space to stay positive. Human
vision then isn't quite like this, nonlinear as it is. So when charted
out in the linear XYZ space, vision takes on a wonky, though convex,
shape.
As such, the "invisible" colors are a mathematical artifact. They are
not an intrinsic part of the color space, but rather the complex side
conditions of which XYZ values you are allowed to use in order not to
encode imaginary colors are the way we model the truth about how human
vision works. If you went out of gamut, it's not that "an imaginary
color has suddenly been discovered", but that you failed to respect the
boundary conditions engendered by the -- rather well-defined --
restrictions of the gamut.
I guess the idea also was not to restrict the color space to the
limits of any existing device.
Indeed it was not. The idea was to start with linear tristimulus theory
which was already known to be true, and then to model the newer (still
rather old) opponent process theory of color within it. CIE's various
standards rather successfully do just that.
Or maybe they just want to fight pirated copies by filling up the
disks faster ;-)
I think this is the most likely explanation. Because, you know, Dolby is
Dolby. It's always gone the Intellectual Property route, throughout its
existence. Hell, at one time they refused to let anybody licence their
noise reduction algorithms except as implemented by their analogue
chips. Fuck, I don't think they even now permit anybody to implement SR,
A, B, C, S, god forbid Prologic-II(x) in software. And they just keep on
"inventing" -- not unlike one of our Finnish national prides ABLOY (lit.
"Aktie Bolaget Lukko Osakeyhtiö", roughly "plc. Lock Plc.") keeps
churning out newer and newer designs of keys in order to keep them under
trademark and design rights.
--
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-40-3751464, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
_______________________________________________
Sursound mailing list
Sursound@music.vt.edu
https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit
account or options, view archives and so on.
