On 2013-04-25, Bearcat Şándor wrote:
So, what i'm understanding is that more speakers will give you less 'holes' in the sound field and more channels will give you a more realistic sound field in a larger room with more people.
Precisely so. There is a bit of funkiness going on with increasing speaker count at first order, so that you shouldn't aim beyond the minimum four channels for horizontal playback before you understand the theory. But otherwise, just so.
A well executed four speaker setup will blow your mind away as far as surround sound goes. Nothing Dolby ever did comes close. The same goes for the minimum 3D setup, even more forcefully.
So 4-channels would suffice for a few people in a mid-field environment, you'd want more for a larger room and more listeners?
With the oldest and simplest possible true ambisonic setup, it works plenty well for a few people. Much better than you'd think; you have to hear it to believe it, and in fact there's still some debate over why it even does that. I mean, we all know full imaging isn't possible in theory near the edge of your playback array, yet it's still sort of workable or at least likable, as a surround technology. The same doesn't go for discrete amplitude panning in the Dolby vein.
Or.. where does one apply this channels vs speakers when talking about playback vs recording?
What determines your transmission signal set is your microphone. In speakers, you can build your rig to follow the best decoder you have at your disposal, or rely on your decoder to handle whatever rig you happen to have.
The theory goes so that you just throw whatever playback rig at the decoder and it handles it perfectly. In practice you'd be better off doing it the other way around; ambisonic decoding theory is nowhere near the vision, even now.
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