[LAU] more than 4 channels for listening? Really?

[Paul Davis]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Monty Montgomery <xiphmont at gmail.com> wrote:
> ("Why didn't Ambisonics win then?" you ask... well, it requires signal
> processing that was hideously expensive at the time of its
> introduction, and the 'add another full channel for each speaker
> approach' was far cheaper and more practical at the time.  Today, the
> average cereal box contains more computing power than used to land on
> the Moon, so I think the Ambisonics approach is suddenly the
> easier/cheaper way to do things. Excepting of course that the discrete
> channel method has a huge installed base.  For that reason, Ambisonics
> is still 'weird' and 'fringe',)

you missed out another important reason. the technology behind
ambisonics is now effectively public domain. there is no money to be
made licensing it to other companies. discrete channel "surround" is
still subject to licensing arrangements, which in turns creates
incentives for license holders to keep using what they paid for and
for license issuers to keep using their IP to generate as much revenue
as possible.

sound on sound covered ambisonics as part of their excellent series on
surround several years ago:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct01/articles/surroundsound3.asp <=
ambisonics article
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Aug01/articles/surroundsound1.asp <=
first article of several on surround