On 05/04/2011 11:33 AM, Richard Dobson wrote:
Sounds like you are positioning six speakers to be the new "industry
standard".
no.
Please don't take this the wrong way, but: exactly what/which
"industry" are you referring to here?
classical recording engineers, film mixing engineers, directors, label
owners, producers, sales people in pro audio gear, instrumental
composers, electronic composers, musicians, cinema audio consultants,
manufactureres of sound reinforcement equipment.
You wrote:
"on the other hand, if you have a third or even fourth order signal
available,..."
So which should it be - third or fourth order? The Industry needs to
know.
no, it doesn't. either one is fine. the higher, the more leeway for
future improvement in playback, but each producer can decide which order
fits their workflow and quality standards.
i was mentioning this 3rd vs. 4th thing because bruce wiggins examined
the use of HO components for the "steering" of a 5.1 decode (which in
principle is not capable of more than 2nd order precision, but HO can
help mend the irregularities iiuc). he seems to have found that 4th
order signals can be steered even better than 3rd order ones. so there
is some benefit of really high orders as production and archival format,
even if all your customers ever get to see are 5.1 speaker feeds.
The opinion on the street is that both DVD-A and even SACD are dead.
So I don't see the "the industry" relishing going there again.
true. but the dvd-audio disaster was a betamax-type screwup, not a
logical thing or an inevitable outcome. and it's quite a downer when you
push a hot new format (DSD) and then lipshitz and vanderkooy go bury it
alive :)
btw, there remain a few tiny classical labels which thrive in the SACD
niche market that remains, and have earned quite some merits for
repertoire off the beaten track...
the pure-audio bluray may offer some fresh perspective on this (it does
8 channels of pcm uncompressed and allows for several such streams in
parallel).
i guess it might eventually become interesting for a small market of
ambisonic enthusiasts (go, nimbus, go!), and you can cater to the mass
market with discrete multichannel stereo on the same disk.
A bit disingenuous - that failure (at least partly by the UK
government at the time) was predominantly one of marketing (or the
lack of it). Had certain "cards" been played well,
fair enough. the fact is that once you've been betamaxed, you stay
betamaxed. then when the next round of innovation comes, you can play
again, but you have to gear up a bit.
From your comments, it would seem to be a six-speaker layout,
no. that is a rig which i feel is kind of a "sweet zone" in terms of
practicablity and price/performance, but it's not something i'm
advocating as a standard. why do so? the beauty of ambisonics is that we
have this amazing flexibility, so why do you keep insisting on setting
this in stone?
with "either" a third or fourth-order stream.
for regular hexagons, more than second order does not make sense as the
rig is not capable of reproducing that kind of angular resolution. if,
however, someone would manufacture an auto-configuring
bruce-wiggins-in-a-box 19 inches wide and with brushed aluminum front
that can optimize irregular layouts automatically, as dictated by the
non-audiophile spouse, then higher-orders to the consumer begin to make
sense again... that's highly hypothetical, but worth bearing in mind.
another argument in support of higher orders in production and archival.
Pre-decoded to six channels so it can fit on a DVD (with instructions
to the user to reconfigure their 5.1 setup), or supplied as HOA
requiring a decoder?
5.1 for now. it would be nice if the market eventually produced
pure-audio blurays with native HOA material, but i wouldn't hold my
breath. the path as i see it is "pre-decoded speakers feeds" for the
time being, but producers must be won over to evaluate HOA for their end
of the production chain. once we're there, all of a sudden there are
tons of productions which could be re-released in native HOA, which
might just happen. another few years down the road.
It remains fascinating to me, (but profoundly un-useful) to see even
the recent debate lead to accounts of half a dozen alternate layouts
using typically a mere ten speakers (but could be eight, could be
twelve, maybe tenth-order...). How on earth do I, short of a luxury
live comparison test (and a fatter wallet than in my entire life so
far) possibly choose between them? More to the point, how does "the
industry"?
again, the producers don't care, that's the whole point of it.
the audiophiles will readily embrace the endless new ways for tweaking
and tuning (as will the sales guys).
whole new publications will spring up like dandelions ("the 100 best
ambisonic layouts for home use", "rouse your spouse - minimally
intrusive multichannel systems for your bedroom", "kindertotenlieder
resurrected - 45 surefire decoder tweaks for a mahler like you've never
heard it before").
--
Jörn Nettingsmeier
Lortzingstr. 11, 45128 Essen, Tel. +49 177 7937487
Meister für Veranstaltungstechnik (Bühne/Studio)
Tonmeister VDT
http://stackingdwarves.net
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