I think there were a number of reasons
1 It took a long time for a medium to arrive that offered
a conveninent way to present a lot of channels. Actually,
while in principle CD did, in practice this was never
used. The surround schemes that came along that worked
commercially either involved CREATING surround from stereo
or were attached to film.
2 Most people see/hear the point of surround in film--those helicopters
flying in--but not in music(as already pointed out).
Surround in music has never been a hit in any form and it still
is not. Moreover most music is not really enhanced by it in the minds of
most people. Orchestral music benefits enormously--most of what you hear
in an orchestra concert is all around you--but most people do not listen
to that kind of music. And canned artificial music , well, surround of any
kind hardly matters. Look at how so many people are happy listening to
stereo overhead phones today!
Ask people on this list about this and they will start talking about all
the contemporary music that uses surround explicitly. Commercially, this
is a joke--a micro fraction of a micro fraction of a market.
3 High End audio, which is the natural place to introduce new
audio ideas, rejected surround, mostly because High End is very
techno-conservative and also thinks stereo works much better than it does
--if only one buys expensive enough power cords and so on.
Also, by nature Ambisonics
requires a good deal of signal processing. And the High Enders do not
believe in that(the fact that many of the recordings they
worship were made with a lot of EQ for instance is swept under the rug).
4 Ambisonics was never presented to the public in a way that made
it easy. Even today, you can hardly buy a plug and play disc.
Ambisonics was invented by a mathematician(I am one myself so I am
not against them) but like most mathematicians, he (and his followers)
underestimated the extent to which the public does not want to think.
They want to plug the blue wire into the blue socket, the red into the
red, and relax to some tunes. Ambisonics had too many options, too many
possibilities, too many ways it could be used for the general public to
deal with. It still does.
Put this all into one package and one can see why it never happened.
There was never any material distributed to the general public in any form
at all(except UHJ but that was also small scale and did not work all that
well),
There was no demand for surround for music and Ambisonics for
movies was never even considered, the movies being locked up by the big
corporate players,
There was a lot of resistance to distributing Ambisonics in a specific
speaker format(madness! No one in the public wants anything else and the
first thing that should have happened was a flood of Ambisonics discs made
to play on 5.1 --but they never showed up)
The whole Ambisonics group of people completely resisted any kind of
sensible distribution(cf the previous). When I suggested here a lot
of 5.1 discs to demo it, there was a thundering silence in response.
No one seemed to want to have Ambisonics presented except as the beautiful
flexible theory it is. And hence it bombed completely.
One might as well try to write a best seller about algebraic topology
(one of my subjects) as to try to sell Ambisonics as it was sold.
People got in the habit of treating it as something esoteric
and noncommercial, and so it stayed. And so it will always stay until
people start to distribute it in speaker-dedicated format.
NOTHING has ever succeeded in audio commercially that required thought
and effort by the public and nothing ever will. Stereo swept because
it sounded better and was EASY. Anyone could set it up on a Christmas
morning--and so they did in the late 1950s. If it had not been easy,
it would not have mattered how good it sounded.
And so it was and is with Ambisonics.
Now let me tell you about higher homotopy groups and why they are all
torsion for spheres beyond the dimension of the sphere except for the
(4n-1)th group for 2n spheres which has rank 1 when tensored with Q
according to rational homotopy theory. Aren't you just dying to spend
some money on that? This is one of the greatest things in mathematics
but no sensible person is expecting to sell it to the public.
Plug and play, and discs that are speaker-matched to 5.1 setups, the only
thing that could have worked-- but no one would do it.
Robert
PS I love Ambisonics theory. But I am a mathematician! That approach
--explaining the theory--is not commercially viable.
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