On Thursday 25 February 2010 19:32:23 Florian Faber wrote: Don't forget that mis-used metal cloth-hanger as connection between amp and speaker. Improves the sound by miles!

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 02:04:37PM -0700, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote: So you *do* have some of those ? :-) -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte !

Bearcat M. Sandor wrote: Just tag them as "collectible." Some idiot somewhere will buy them! ;-) -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

Bearcat M. Sandor wrote: Sounds like there may be a few idiots in NJ. -- David gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community

On 26/02/2010, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote: Didn't someone once do some tests and conclude that the absolute zenith of amp/speaker cabling performance could be found in automobile jump leads?

On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 05:06 +0000, Gwenhwyfaer wrote: I once set up some speakers for a test, involving two pairs of well-known "high-end" cables and a pair of ordinary cables. One pair stood out above the others, it appears. I actually had people offering to buy them! I got hell off my Mum when I went back round to her house though, because now the extension lead for the strimmer was too short... Gordon MM0YEQ

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: Thanks Fernando! I look forward to reading that article. Skimming it now, it looks interesting. So the speaker angle is more important than distance? It's the angles relative to the listener, right? So a center channel is designed for people who are sitting off axis and otherwise not needed?

On Sun, 2010-02-28 at 11:51 +0100, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote: Jörn, I would like to hear the original recording in such a way that the natural space of the original recording comes through. What i want is that feeling when your walls dissapear sonically and you are suddenly inside the church that the choir was done in, or in the small club that the sax player is playing in ect. Obviously this will only happen with live and well done recordings. retrieving the ambiance that the mics picked up during recording, even on stereo sources. My only experience so far with center speakers has been discrete surround in movies or 5.1 music where, yes the performer in question is in the center, but sounds canned there. They are *placed* in the center, locked in place, and sound rather like a canned voice. Most of the time it seems like i should not be hearing them in the center, but a few inches off (or even feet) off center sometimes as thats where they were standing relative to the mics. The center speaker locks them in place and two stereo speakers do not. So i'm looking for a natural reproduction of acoustics and placement. If center channels in a quality system can do this i'm all for them. I don't expect to have lot of people listening. Probably more like 3, but i'm the audiophile in this family. Bearcat

Arnold Krille wrote: (my email client at work does not to replies well so i'm doing so down here. Thanks. I've been looking into ambisonics and that's actually what i was thinking of in this 4 channel set up. It sounds difficult to set up and will take a lot of learning. Regarding the speakers: Actually, they are fairly cheap as far as higher end speakers go. I like them quite a lot given their price/performance point. It sounds like i'd do fine with 4 channels in a small space even when playing back hollywood surround sound material.

To be clear--- You do mean a three channel first-order setup with eight speakers, correct? To answer questions a few others asked, It's not that a bunch of channels are needed, rather that more speakers are needed to fill gaps in the wavefront imaging. quad/5.1/7.1/etc takes an ad-hoc approach to this by adding more and more fully discrete channels to 'plug holes' while Ambisonics takes a methodical approach that simply adds more speakers to the already constructed/encoded model. ("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',) Cheers! Monty

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Monty Montgomery &lt;xiphmont(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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

On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 23:01 +0100, Arnold Krille wrote: wow. That sounds ideal! What software are you using to accomplish this and how? ? What sound card are you using and are you using an external d/a converter Thanks,

Arnold, 5.1 is not about proper physical modelling of sound sources, but more about producing a 'sound experience'. This can mean, for example, that the audio engineer creates a 2.0 mix and puts some ambience on the rear channels. It will be a completely different beast and in my experience it sounds worse than a pure 5.1 playback. If you find 5.1 material that works out ok, please let me know. I'm always interested in good references. Flo -- Machines can do the work, so people have time to think. public key DA43FEF4 x-hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net

Forgive me, I'm a newb to practical Ambisonics myself (just starting to play with it, had mostly been just familiar with the theory in the past)... Do you really mean third order ambisonics, or do you mean three-channel first-order ambisonics? I had been under the impression that it was unusual to run across actual high-er order recordings/playback systems and that most of the installed base was first order. Cheers, Monty

On 02/26/2010 11:27 AM, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: i have a vague hope that something magical will indeed happen: the sources will be less focused on the speakers, but a lot better for all other positions (which is what matters), and i think there's a chance that the perceived sweet spot is a lot larger than for discrete playback. it sure is in my subjective perception - i'm putting together some listening tests to get other people's opinion about this and see if it makes sense.

On 03/01/2010 02:38 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: 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 :) 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! 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. i'd love to try such a rig outdoors, i can imagine how nice it could be. ooh yes. i wonder what elysium could be had for the alcoholic equivalent of, say, 20 meters of monster cable ;-D

On 03/01/2010 05:07 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote: i was using ambdec... first you can try to deactivate delay compensation altogether (but that's a little extreme for the corner speakers in a rectangular rig), so i backed up the configuration file and modified the distance measurements to introduce small arbitrary errors. haven't heard it. also by chowning? that link does not work for me - nothing obvious though, the line-break isn't the problem. or not. as i've had to learn, don't measure too well :-D

On 02/26/2010 01:40 AM, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote: here's a tutorial i wrote 2 years ago, it's still relevant, only you should of course use more recent versions of the software mentioned in there: http://stackingdwarves.net/public_stuff/linux_audio/tmt08/Ambisonic_Listeni… http://stackingdwarves.net/public_stuff/linux_audio/tmt08/Ambisonic_Listeni… there's a video from LAC 2008, where i presented an earlier version of that paper: http://stackingdwarves.net/public_stuff/linux_audio/ambi_at_home/2008-0229-… corresponding slides are in the same directory. you can skip the room/speaker correction part - if your gear and your room is good, the benefits will be marginal anyways, and it greatly simplifies things. regards, jörn

On 02/25/2010 11:01 PM, Arnold Krille wrote: it depends on the order of your source signal. when i got the chance to play with a second order mix in the sala bianca in parma (a four-wall wavefield synthesis rig) with fons, our first test was to create six virtual speakers in a hexagon. sounded very nice, even better than discrete speakers because you can place them further away to better resemble a plane wave. funny thing was when we went to eight speakers, the localisation deteriorated, very slightly but noticeably. generally, it seems to be advisable not to use too many speakers for any given order. 8 is great for 3rd order horizontal, ok for 2nd and probably too many for first. there is a sound scientific explanation for this which i have forgotten... let me try (and i hope fons will jump in if i'm getting stuff badly wrong): i believe it has to do with the blurring of the energy vector at HF - ideally, you want just one speaker to play a discrete source (which means rE equals one, for a source coming from where the speaker is). the higher the number of speakers that contribute (and if your signal is first order, all speakers will, to some extent), the lower the energy vector, which means you only get good directional cues in the LF band. additionally, HF phasing effects become more pronounced since a number of more-or-less coherent sources interfere. you can work around that by "de-tuning" the delay compensation, but then you trade localisation precision for phasiness. these issues also explain why a 3d rig gives worse 2d reproduction than a horizontal-only rig. it's all not as bad as it sounds, but your investment might not pay off the way you're hoping. best, jörn

disclaimer: this user is getting seriously confused. On 02/28/2010 01:56 PM, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: i can see how a soundfield mike would capture (and thus include in the first-order signal)those aliased components, but then what about a panner? following your argument, shouldn't we add higher-order aliased components into a panner matrix? hmm. i still don't see from this explanation why 1st order horizontal sounds worse over 8 speakers (or 12, for the sake of argument) than over just six, even if i'm in the sweet spot. best, jörn (who is about to crack open a can of fizzy InstaMath(tm) extra-strong)

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 10:10:29PM +0100, fons(a)kokkinizita.net wrote: Way off-topic, but in 1992 Frank Zappa with Ensemble Moderne delivered a series of concerts in some of the finest concert halls in Europe, mixed live in 6-channel surround. I cannot imagine what that would have sounded like, other than incredible. Did anyone here get to attend any of those Yellow Shark concerts? Zappa was a huge audio engineering nerd. -ken