PS There is one more reason, which is less obvious and perhaps not obvious at all to those of you in Europe. Namely, Americans have never liked one point recording. They have never liked Blumlein or ORTF(quasi one point) stereo and they still do not. Starting with the Bell Telephone Labs(as the organization was called then) experiments with spaced omnis, the USA audio industry has always recorded via some half baked scheme based very loosely on Huygens' Principle, apparently unaware and unconcerned that Huygens' Principle requires infinitely many samples(or at least a very large number) rather than two or three. The results can be beautiful tonally but of course they are just silly as stereo, and as a recording of what was really there at any particular location.
But thinking is hard. It is easier to rave on in a pseudoliterary/poetic fashion about "soundstage" and to heck with the fact--and of course it is a fact--that microphones spaced five meters apart are not going to be recording anything even remotely resembling the actual acoustic experience of one person at any one location whatever. This fantasy idea of recording--e.g., Telarc, the dominant force in classical recording for decades in the USA used three spaced omnis almost the whole time--controlled everything in the USA. Ambisonics pursues a goal that USA recording engineers are so far removed from that it almost does not exist for them. The idea of recording a real event as it was is remote to them indeed. (And of course pop music recording has nothing to do with this at all). Classical recordings are supposed to "sound good" and be "spacious" and have a "soundstage". Never mind that they sound not at all like real music. And of course stereo playback goes right along. No one (nearly) sets up stereo that does something close to playing back what is recorded. They try to supplement the already way overabundant phase-iness of the spaced omni recordings with a lot of sounds bounced off the walls with the idea of making things (even) more "spacious". And into this scene, people really expected to introduce successfully Ambisonics? Talk about optimism. In a country where Blumlein stereo made almost no headway, why would one expect Ambisonics to get anywhere? The commercial presentation of Ambisonics was so woeful(like Siegmund referring to himself) that it was doomed. But even a good presentaton would have been fighting uphill against firmly entrenched and long so wrong ideas . Robert _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
