On 07/10/2011 03:41 AM, Marc Lavallée wrote:
I'm waiting for a pair of
very directional speakers that should (hopefully) help me enjoy
conventional stereo.
then the manger might be for you: http://manger-msw.de/index.php?language=en
this is a speaker that has been optimized for very good impulse response
behaviour (at the expense of almost everything else).
in addition to its quick reaction, it's beaming like mad, which means
that it practically eliminates early reflections over a wide band (a lot
wider than conventional dome tweeters). its stereo reproduction is stunning.
if you can do with very little efficiency (sorry tube amp fans) and
don't mind around 10% THD in the low frequencies (which is not as bad as
it sounds, but also not as good as manger make it sound), then you
should try it.
Presenting ambisonics as a scientific tool,
which it is
a sound engineering secret,
which it hopefully isn't anymore, at least many people are working hard
to make it widely known as a viable alternative
or a surround system for museums
which is a very interesting usecase
or stadiums,
which it is absolutely not, and nobody in their right minds is doing that
are not very good ways to
promote it to home listeners,
> especially considering the quasi-absence
> of ambisonics material in circulation.
which none of the above claims to do. home listeners are consumers.
there is no point in promoting something to consumers when (as you point
out) there is no product. you have to promote it to _producers_.
If you could help me understand spherical harmonics, I'd be a "MAG
fanboy" in no time.
anyone who can grasp m/s stereo can grasp arbitrary order ambisonics.
i'm talking "understand the principle", not "grok all the calculations
and their implications to the nth degree".
The best didactic resource I found is a very
strange article titled "Notes on Basic Ideas of Spherical Harmonics".
It's so good that I barely understand 10% of it.
isn't that a text by robert greene? i think i've read it. yeah, mr
greene is a mathematician, and they like it rigorous. but you don't need
that level of understanding to use ambisonics. you don't have to
understand electronics to use an amplifier, and you don't have to
understand acoustics to use a microphone. some insight helps, and the
more you know the better, but being able to build some piece of gear
from scratch is not a prerequisite to get started.
check out the link i posted earlier, it tries to introduce the concept
of spatial sampling to practical sound engineers. there's one
(intentional) gap in the logic, in that it starts with the
kirchhoff-helmholtz integral (which strictly speaking is the basis for
wfs, not ambisonics) and then jumps to spherical sampling. it's not 100%
kosher from a mathematical POV, but hopefully easier to understand. and
as the order goes up, the area of correct reproduction expands, so that
it ultimately approaches the KH surface from the inside.
if you're in a hurry, there are slides as well, which are a lot more
compact:
http://stackingdwarves.net/public_stuff/linux_audio/tmt10/TMT2010_J%c3%b6rn_Nettingsmeier-Higher_order_Ambisonics-Slides.pdf
best,
jörn
--
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487
Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)
Tonmeister VDT
http://stackingdwarves.net
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