26 Feb
2010
26 Feb
'10
12:28 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Monty Montgomery <xiphmont(a)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