OK I thought that was a good idea, for people to say what they thought
was good and not good about Ambisonics. So here I go(first I guess
but my mother always said Act in haste, repent at leisure. I think
she meant it as cautionary but I have always taken it as advisory!).
Good
1 Elegant as mathematics
2 Forces people to use one point miking which in itself
is already a HUGE thing because it eliminates the absurd
manipulativeness of much of commercial recording practice.
3 In principle, has the capability of reconstructing the complete
soundfield.
4 Puts height in the picture and gets rid of the sound through
a horizontal slit of stereo(which is ironically more like that the better
it is done!)
5 In practice, more robust than one might have expected
at working over a large listening area (if that matters).
6 In principle, the timbre errors of stereo arising from around the head
summation are eliminated.
Not so good
1 Emphasis on homogeneity makes it inefficient when not high order.
(Everyone knows that perception to the side of a listener is quite
different from perception frontally, but this is ignored)
2 (related to 1) Because one- point miking ignores transient time
of arrival differences as such , one of the basic cues of sonic perception
is suppressed explicitly and is only returned to the picture with higher
order.
3 Impractical number of speakers needed really to work(cf point 2).
4 Impractical number of channels needed to really work(because
higher order is needed).
5 In practice, keeping noise low enough is difficult.
6 Nearly oomplete lack of demo material, which makes it all
but impossible to interest the public.
One somewhat incidental issue
7 Mathematics is too tricky for most people in audio to appreciate
(I know this is so because I have tried to write about Ambisonics
for the general audio public--no dice, people did not get it even
though I thought what I wrote was clear as crystal)
About point 2: the same issue arises in Blumlein stereo, which is why some
people like ORTF better. Ideal would be Blumlein up to around 700 Hz and
switch to ORTF above that, it seems, or something along those lines.
(Blumlein the man had ideas on this, of course).
I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to get the ball rolling.
Good suggestion, I think, that people should make such lists. I am
curious to see what others have to say.
Robert
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