On 13 Apr 2012, at 18:38, [email protected] wrote: > Beginning in the 1990s, the music industry tried to promote the *surround* > (i.e. 5.1 style) special effect -- driven by the installed base of home > theaters and DVD players, along with a preceived need to recapture the > revenues being lost in CD sales (due to the MP3 special effect).
That is, because the 5.1-style special effect essentially sucks and is in no way comparable to Ambisonics, except for the few cases where we're dealing with pre-decoded Ambisonic mixes/recordings. > They *spent* a lot of money, tried various technologies, and they failed. > The "consumer" did not believe that it was "good enough" (i.e. compared to > the stereo special effect) to make the switch. No one is going to try > that again. They spent a lot of money trying to sell technologies they perceived as being able to sell expensive, special purpose, premium-priced electronics and media, i.e. SACD, DVD-Audio, and all the gear that goes with it. It failed miserably, because 5.1 speaker systems sold generally had two bearably good front speakers for the "main" stereo feed, and some tinny, crappy surround speakers, and an totally card-board like sounding even lousier center channel speaker. The result was a sound stage that fell apart, no matter how good the mix. UHJ Stereo requires no special equipment, because primarily the majority of users can use it as stereo material. The same wasn't true for the 90s experiments, which required different, considerably more expensive media, and toying around with remotes and menu structures to play back a stereo version, provided one was even available. Further the 90s experiment involved DRM-crippled media, which means that even though one already paid a hefty premium over a CD, one wasn't able to rip the disk and put the music on a portable player, first due to DRM, second because a portable player wouldn't know how to interpret surround sound media streams. In short, yes, the 90s experiment was a total failure, because it was trying to sell expensive gear, expensive media, and made the consumer's life considerably more complex for no known benefit. Who'd take on that hassle without knowing it's worth it? And who'd think it's worth it, after listening to the few miserable attempts at 5.1 mixes? UHJ Stereo delivery is a totally different beast.... > Furthermore, as music reproduction shifted to MP3-based online delivery and > ear-bud reproduction (i.e. another version of the stereo special effect) > -- the idea of pretending that all this isn't a *special effect* by trying > to get "absolute sound" in your living-room just seemed more ridiculous than > ever. ...because one source can be played as regular stereo, could be decoded binaurally by portable media players with today's low-voltage high-performance ARM CPUs, and could be decoded into a 4.0 surround stream by devices like e.g. an AppleTV. All that's needed are rather minor software updates for existing devices, and high-quality UHJ-preserving lossy compression or lossless audio sales over existing established channels. The costs for the consumer is close to zero, the cost for the device manufacturers are a few minor software updates, and the cost on the production side is a few percent more for a slightly more complex production. All the complexities that the 90s experiments had would simply not be present. The listening pleasure, given the little extra overhead, has a good chance to be sufficiently big that surround productions start becoming popular and are being used as differentiating features for otherwise more or less competing productions. It would be a low-key, low-cost way of getting surround sound established for music by osmosis, rather than using the sledgehammer approach that tried to vacuum the consumers wallet empty that was employed in the 90s. In other words, the failure of the 90s, if anything, illustrate why all the talk about HOA being a minimum requirement are so toxic: because HOA would be at every level even more expensive and more complex than the failed 90s approach. So your reasoning has some merit: to show exactly why HOA is a no-go until first surround sound for music is an established fact, and people want more and better. Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list [email protected] https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
