On Sun, May 01, 2011 at 05:25:40PM +0100, Richard Dobson wrote: > > ... > > Short of making the test, we will never know if the Ambisonic approach > would have been "better". The concert would be perfectly well described > in the above terms of being "completely worked out in terms of using an > ad-hoc [well, octagonal] speaker layout". The point is that the effect > was more than sufficiently engaging as is; even if the Ambisonic > approach would be "better", the discrete approach was not in any > meaningful sense "bad". Just, I guess, "different". > > The other point I would make in this regard is that one simply does not > go to a performance desperately trying to establish ~exactly~ where a > sound is coming from! (well, I don't, anyway). It was clear and > effective enough as it was. One just wants to relax and receive what > there is to receive. My concern is that the relentless pursuit of > ever-sharper localisation has become such a priority (dare I say it, an > obsession), that the technical priorities have got steadily out of hand; > and that as often as not a simple, minimal, positionally "dithered" > outcome is just fine, and may indeed, in many cases, be artistically > preferable.
I can perfectly follow your argumentation here. And in the case of the work I referred to earlier, probably little would be lost in the artistic sense or in audience appreciation if some corners were cut in the spatialisation and things would be less exact than envisaged by the composer. But as the sound engineer who's expected to provide a solution I'm not in a position to argue about this. And from the same perspective there is another point to consider. What if you have not just a single piece requiring some ad-hoc speaker placement, but three or four in the same concert, each of them having their specific requirements ? In that case I (as the sound engineer) would want to use a technology that allows me to cover all of them without having to physically move speakers and rewire the whole setup for each piece. And that is exactly what using HOA provides in such a situation - it abstracts the hardware. This is a point made very strongly by Joern Nettingsmeier in various papers and reports about his work, and I couldn't agree more with what he writes about this. Ciao, -- FA _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
