On 01/05/2011 20:29, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
..
the point is: if you want to produce in tenth order and have the means
to do it, your customer can still enjoy it on his/her 2nd order rig.
Fine. I agree. But what exactly is a '2nd order rig'? Some number of
speakers, or the combination of source, decoding and layout?
All I am asking is, what the smallest "acceptable" entry-level setup is.
It used to be first-order horizontal, and four speakers, or 1st-order
peri and 8 speakers. Clearly that is no longer acceptable - but what the
new entry-level is is still less than clear to me. From the above it
would appear to be 2nd-order source played over whatever the smallest
acceptable 'second-order rig' is defined to be.
..
the bus width restriction is actually a bogus argument, which is only
true in practice because that's how avid and friends milk their
customers. heck, going from a 16ch bus width limit to 32ch should not
ever include more than a recompile on decently written software.
Depends to what extent it requires GUI features. At the moment the
typical DAW draws all sorts of stuff for each channel of the main bus.
Without the need to draw flashy graphics, I totally agree. We can do it
in Csound already. 95% of the cost of any GUI application is the
graphics. I am still wondering what a full native HOA DAW (with height
and full automation) would look like.
how can localisation and separation be distinct?
I think the two words are too useful to be treated as exact synonyms -
that would mean one of them is simply wasted. So I would say the former
is absolute - this or that degree azimuth. The latter is relative - A is
20deg to the right of B (or even, 2M behind B). If that's not a useful
distinction, OK.
if two sources are,
say, 20° apart, it's very hard to separate them when you're sitting in
the precise sweetspot of a FOA system, and totally impossible outside.
All I can say is, my memories are different - I saw/heard very accurate
localisation and separation in a live Electric Phoenix gig at the
Arnolfini, Bristol, maybe 20 years ago as I mentioned before - the
amplified voice was localised so that you heard each voice ~exactly~ at
the position the singer was in. They were some 40 feet away, so very
much less than 20 degrees, and I was sat a long way left of centre, in
raked seating. The effect was somewhat jaw-dropping; and as far as I am
aware, that was all first-order analog panning, engineered by John
Whiting. Of course, it was an auditorium-sized space. Dave Malham may
know what order he was actually using as he probably designed the
decoder - if it was HOA I will fully and gladly acknowledge my
misunderstanding. I have no memory at all of the number or location of
the loudspeakers.
Sadly I live at the opposite end of the country from all the UK
Ambisonic centres of excellence, so my prospects for hearing the state
of the art and being duly persuaded thereof are presently fairly remote.
..
that is utter nonsense. the most important selling point of ambisonics
is precisely that it decouples the transmission format from the speaker
layout.
I know that. I make that very point myself often enough! But your own
words appear to conflate decoding order and speaker rig together. There
is your input HOA order, and the sufficient speaker rig which plays
whatever you decode into it. Either way, your "2nd-order rig" is a
nominal combination standard that in practice combines the order of the
decoding and the speaker layout into some single named entity. As I
said, I am just asking for the lowest acceptable "rig". Just in case I
can by some miracle get a grant to buy the kit without the proposal
being shot down by referees. But in the absence of cheap and willing
roadies, the fewer speakers the better! I will reluctantly accept that
FOA is no longer enough; that must be kind of disappointing though for
all those who posted FOA tracks to Ambisonia.
..
all that DAW manufacturers need to learn is that marketing and sales
should have no say in how wide the busses can be - if you leave that to
the techies, the answer is "arbitrarily wide".
Well, we can but hope!
Richard Dobson
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