It was me who suggested that Cara should email Surrsound as was so tied up with the conference when
she emailed me, but I never thought that you guys would respond so enthusiastically, and making so
many good points - almost nothing more for me to say, however....a few minor additions...
Etienne suggested the reformulation of Cara's question as
"Given ambisonic's lack of commercial success and lack of content, why has it persisted for so
many years?"
which is a good suggestion (and goes along with some of Peter's advice), however, it should maybe
expanded a bit or at least modified to indicate that it is the mass market in which there was (and
is) a lack of success. Not that this is necessarily a reliable augury for the future - don't forget
that stereo first appeared in the 19th century and was entirely the province of the _very_ rich
and/or powerful for nearly thirty years (look up Theatrophone) before actually dying out altogether
for domestic use until its reappearance, once technology had moved on sufficiently, in the 50's -
though it was not as easy to set up the early systems as one poster seemed to imply, at least, not
until stereo radiograms (plug'n'play!) started to be sold (late 50's?)
Geoffrey, one of the few around who actually had experience of the whole thing,
said
"Others had other objectives. Once NRDC/BTG became involved, commercial objectives, in retrospect
maybe unrealistic, were added, and we had to service these in order to finance what we really
wanted to do."
which is certainly true. I remember having an "interesting" discussion in the in the early 80's with
one of the minions from NRDC (it was when I was building my 'Digitally Programmable Soundfield
Controller' with NRDC Seedcorn money) about the way they were trying to make their money back. This
was to recover costs through royalties on studio equipment. This, of course, was a small market,
which meant there had to be a big mark-up, which meant, in turn, that the equipment got priced out
of the region where small studios could afford it - the small studios being, in my opinion, where
they were most to get initial market penetration. Again, in my opinion, they should have been almost
giving that gear away and recovering costs via a small royalty on sales of recordings (a la CD)
Dave
--
These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
/*********************************************************************/
/* Dave Malham http://music.york.ac.uk/staff/research/dave-malham/ */
/* Music Research Centre */
/* Department of Music "http://music.york.ac.uk/"; */
/* The University of York Phone 01904 322448 */
/* Heslington Fax 01904 322450 */
/* York YO10 5DD */
/* UK 'Ambisonics - Component Imaging for Audio' */
/* "http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/mustech/3d_audio/"; */
/*********************************************************************/
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