On 30/04/2011 18:47, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 03:50:19PM +0100, Richard Dobson wrote:
On 30/04/2011 01:12, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
I sometimes wish these people could be locked away in a closet and
released only after 1st order Ambisonics is sufficiently accepted by
the audio community at large and the consumer electronics and
computer software makers. Maybe we might get somewhere that way.
I remember arguing much the same point ten years ago (or eleven - AMB
was announced at ICMC in 2000)
and had existed for some 25 years before that...
AMB is the file format I defined (following a somewhat one-directional
"consultation" on this list). I made freely available some tools to use
it very shortly afterwards, in the form of the CDP Toolkit. Perhaps that
has already faded into obscurity after all this time.
and got precisely nowhere.
Should that be a surprise ? If as a composer you are used to just
placing a speaker in the right place when you want a particular
sound to come from a certain direction in a concert, would you be
impressed by the performance of first order Ambisonics ?
Yes! I still am. Even on the bare minimum four speakers. I remember
being impressed by it many years ago (eng. John Whiting, for Electric
Phoenix). I think it is high time first-order was re-evaluated, in a
more, um, "realistic" way. Let the question be, not how many speakers
you can justify, but how few you can manage with.
The simple fact is that 1st order AMB has no chance against 5.1. For the
applications that are wanted by the mass consumer market, 5.1 actually
works and delivers better results than 1st order AMB ever could.
I seem to recall a certain patent was taken out a while back
specifically to enable B-format to be rendered over 5.1. Not ideal, by
any means, but ~possible~. And it ~would~ improve the vast majority of
film soundtracks, most of which do pretty rubbish quasi-spatialization,
where they bother at all.
And of course there is absolutely no mileage whatsoever in any research
application dealing with first-order. Any such application would, I have
no doubt, be likely shot down in flames by those asked to referee the
proposal. I even have such a project in mind - periphonic sonification
of LHC collision data. There are reasons enough why such a project would
get short shrift from the powers that be, but one of them would
certainly be "should be using at least third-order".
Compared to the cost of the LHC and the data obtained from it, a third
order system would be cheap.
Not if we want this to be available in schools, or for small public
workshops, it isn't! But I guess you have proved my point.
..
So I fear the battle for Ambisonics has already been lost; it remains a
niche interest for a few researchers and individuals with the time,
money and space to indulge it.
Or snobs as the OP called them. And yes, I'd agree that the battle to
get 1st order into the consumer world has been lost.
But you are not going to get Ambisonics of higher order into the
consumer world either - unless it can be put into 5.1 (so just ~maybe~,
2nd order; seems to work pretty well). Indeed I have not seem any
suggestion of that goal for ages on this list. Not much reference to
composers either, for that matter. The issue for the consumer is simple
- the number of speakers needed for credible surround, and (geeks
excepted) the minimum of "setting up" and fiddling around.
In sum, the work I am involved in is called, broadly, "outreach". The
one aspect conspicuous by its absence in all the discussions here has
been outreach. When a third-order system is decribed as "cheap", you
just know that the consumer (or any other outreach target) has been left
far behind.
Richard Dobson
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