26 Feb
2010
26 Feb
'10
5:47 p.m.
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:28:43PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Monty Montgomery
<xiphmont(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ah, but there's then a built-in incentive for someone wanting to compete, to use the
free/public-domain alternative and increase their profits by not having to pay license
fees. That'd mostly be the case if the license fees are per-unit or annual dues; if
they're per-unit then one could theoretically increase profits and/or compete on price
by removing that cost.
Although, if you'd have to include the licensed thing anyway as an alternative because
nobody'd actually buy the product without it, then we're right back into the same
kind of monopolistic compatibility/marketshare trap that have shut out free alternatives
to everything for decades. Oh well, nothing to see here, move along....
("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
Cool stuff.
-ken