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

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On Mon, 2010-03-01 at 02:50 +0100, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
> On 03/01/2010 02:38 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> 
> > In our last summer concert which I helped organize, and the winter
> > concert a couple of weeks ago which I organized I played a couple of
> > "oldies", 4 channel pieces by John Chowning using an 8 speaker ring and
> > 4 virtual speakers rendered through 3rd order ambisonics.
> >
> > The highly subjective non-scientific impression is that it does sound
> > better than just 4 speakers. If the decoder is properly calibrated then
> > your 4 virtual speakers will be in the exact right position which helps.
> > Plus the sources are "diffuse" as you imagine.
> >
> > The summer concert was done outdoors in the backyard of our building
> > (ie: no real room to interfere with the spatialization cues) and some
> > people claimed it was the best rendering of Turenas they had ever
> > heard[*]
> 
> funny. i did a concert for the DEGEM last december, also with an 
> ambisonic rig, and one of the pieces played happened to be... turenas :)

Ha ha, well, it is a classic after all!

(when I was in TU I taught this sound in space class and Prof Stefan
Weinzierl was also teaching a similar course at the same time and we
_both_ played Turenas in the first class - students were a little
puzzled, as well as myself :-)

> yes, it sounded excellent here, too. then folkmar hein (who had 
> suggested the chowning piece) had me mix it to stereo, and then to mono, 
> and it still sounded great... that doppler shift stuff is sooo robust!

That is surprising, I have to try it!

> but that piece gave me one particular headache: the phasiness artefacts 
> were very apparent, to the point that we decided to apply random 
> staggering to the delays (which i had measured to within a few cms, 
> sigh!). that fixed it.

Interesting. I don't think I quite understand. Do you have code for
that? Or any suggestions?

A couple of weeks ago I did Phoné and it also sounded very good (this
time inside our small concert hall). 

> i'd love to try such a rig outdoors, i can imagine how nice it could be.

It was very very nice. The backyard is not so big and is flanked on two
sides by the building itself. See it here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=&vps=1&jsv=209c&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=43.443045,66.708984&ie=UTF8&geocode=FfT_OgIdBsy3-A&split=0

We bought 8 new QSC speakers and used a couple of old Meyer subs and
after calibrating a little bit it was sounding great. I did not measure
to the centimeter but it still worked. I imagine with all your
experience you would do a much better job. 

-- Fernando