On 13 Apr 2012, at 04:08, Stefan Schreiber <st...@mail.telepac.pt> wrote:
> Steven Dive wrote: > >> >> >> IMHO I can't see how FOA isn't clearly worth promoting along with up to >> 3rd order G-format decodes for 5.1/7.1 setups for home users. Basically, >> get UHJ and, while we are at it, superstereo into people's homes, then get >> on with full 1st and higher orders. >> >> Steve > > > Steve, Anthony: > > In which sense is UHJ and "superstereo" a viable alternative to 5.1 surround, > if 5.1 is clearly better than any 2-channel system can be? Because it's NOT better. 99.9% of 5.1 mixes SUCK because they are pan-pot BS. 0.1% maybe use Ambisonic panning to do the mix, and they may be great, provided your setup is matching exactly the setup for which it is pre-decoded, at which point it is barely better than UHJ, shedding some matrixing constraints, while adding issues of irregular speaker arrays. Chances are, a 5.1 surround mix is a 4.0 in reality, using only 5.1 distribution. Further, as I said, 90%+ of 5.1 installations are not suitable for music playback anyway, because of the fact that the speakers are neither full-range, nor even matching in tone coloration. Without excessive room EQ and speaker compensation, phase is all over the place, and any moving sound changes character as it goes from front speakers to side or rear speakers, because they are typically different and cheaper speaker models. None of that matters for a bit of sci-fi whoosh or action flick shooting, it's however useless for music. So as far as my experience goes, the assertion that 5.1 is better than UHJ Stereo or 4.0 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics is plain wrong. > You should introduce something which exceeds the existing solutions, not > going back to something which fits into the "stereo distribution chain". We > already had this. Because that's still the only thing we have, the stereo distribution chain. A new technology needs to get the foot into the door. Nobody is going to make a speculative investment costing massive amounts of money, for an unproven, no-demand system. The only way to get it in the door is through guerilla tactics. Quality doesn't matter, convenience and simplicity do. Why do you think MP3 trounced AAC, which in turn trounced CD sales, which again are leaps and bounds above DVD-Audio and SACD? Only AFTER surround music is common can one address quality issues, just like only after online music was established, slowly the cries for better quality were raised, and the bit rates went up, and DRM was removed. According to your line reasoning, online music distribution cannot possibly be successful until it's lossless audio without DRM, but the reality was different. People bought lousy 128kbit/s compressed files encumbered with DRM, over better quality and DRM-free CDs, because it was SIMPLE and CONVENIENT. UHJ is simple and convenient, because people can buy it as a regular stereo track like the rest of the music. No pop-up with a choice: stereo or surround version, no playlists where one has to make sure the stereo version ends up on the iPod, and the surround version is used for home playback. None of that. One file, one solution, stereo, portable, home, car, whatever. No confusion for consumers, distribution channel, radio capable, etc. THAT works. > I have written that you could decode a 3rd order .AMB file on a 4 or 6 > speaker home installation, for example ignoring the 2nd and 3rd order > components. 8 speakers would be even better, but less is still possible. And I have said that none of that matters, because no musician in the world, except some esoteric avant guard musicians with a cumulative audience smaller than the number of members on this list is going to go through the cost and trouble of doing HOA productions. The only Ambisonic productions you're going to see are the ones that Tony "Fatso" Miller (and similarly unknown people) can do in their basement studios for some garage band that scratched together $500 to finally get a "professional demo CD made". That sort of production is where the vast majority of music originates. Even if you go up three notches, do you really think the producer of Madonna's MDNA album has the slightest clue about HOA? You might be able to get such industry people to toy around with one extra channel and go from a LR or MS setup to a XYW setup, provided they can ship regular CDs that sell millions of copies. If they can mention in the liner notes, that as a special bonus it is surround encoded for playback on systems capable for that, then that's an added bonus, and that's ALL you're going to get until 100 million people or more have Ambisonic setups at home and ask for more. It is exactly these things, where e.g. some hard core Madonna fan would want to hear the album "the way it was meant to be heard" that will get people to buy a decent 4.0 setup, and spread the word. Nobody is going to have 6 or 8 speakers in the house, because 6 or 8 speakers are too expensive for the vast majority, and because living rooms are too small to properly place 6 or 8 speakers in most cases, even if people had the money for all these speakers. > (You can watch a 1080p movie on an "underspecified" SD television, or a 720 > line TV. The loudspeaker number above is just the equivalent. Downsizing a > format to a device with lower resolution is mostly not an issue. You also can > watch a photo on a computer screen, even if the resolution of a current > digital camera is certainly much higher than any computer monitor can show.) Yes, you can, except when storage and bandwith is expensive, nobody gives a hoot about what's technically possible. As long as good speakers don't come down at an order of magnitude in price, and decoders have the ability to AUTOMATICALLY compensate for bad spaker placement (both in distance and angle), a 4.0 or 4.1 setup is the best one can hope for realistically. > Anthony: You should read what people (this means: me! :-) ) say, not what you > would like to read. For example, I never said anywhere that music should be > distributed on BD discs. (Have been here a long time before. This is probably > just history. IMO the distribution of surround music via UHJ stereo tracks > belongs into the same category. Listen to UHJ if available and if you can > decode this, but don't promote this for the "future practical distribution of > surround", because 5.1 already exists.) The future goes in stages. Right now, music distribution goes online. If it's Apple or Amazon or what else doesn't matter. Online music right now is all about stereo, whatever surround music distribution existed for a short time was SACD, DVD-Audio and some DTS encoded CDs, all of which failed miserably and require playback software or equipment that people simply don't have. You're not selling surround music by telling consumers, producers, distributors, etc. to have to deal with multiple formats and SKUs, multiple mixes, confusing choices. You get surround sound to the masses if it's simply there whether they want it or not, you get producers to do suround music if you can tell them to make a stereo CD or online download that just so happens to have hidden surround capabilities. No choice, no confusion, no multiple SKUs, no multiple mixes. Simple. One single thing, that as an easter egg has a hidden capability to bring out more of the music. THAT you can sell to the entire chain from musicians to consumers and everyone in between. > I said that Apple doesn't support BD < movies > on any Mac OS version. I > don't buy into the excuse that the Blu-ray DRM (AACA/BD+ support) would > "break" the Mac OS architecture, which would be a longer discussion. But I > have actually more important things to do than to discuss these issues here, > honestly. (Historically: Apple had pretended they would "finally" support > Blu-Ray, in 2005/2006. They didn't tell it would not be possible. The "bag of > hurt" story was invented way later. ) No it was not, because Apple thought they could convince the BD association to different terms. What's written here, is still largely valid: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html It's not written by Apple, it's not even written about Apple, it's written about how it affects Vista. Apple simply chose not to have their system affected the same way for video that they might just as well distribute through iTunes without all that baggage in the OS. > I don't have to promote Ambisonics, specifically I don't have any plans to > replace 5.1 with FOA. What is the huge deal about? (Both formats have > advantages and disadvantages, compared to each other. You also have to > consider that 5.1 can be mixed or recorded in very different ways, and some > or actually pretty convincing. For film, 5.1 is probably superior. You could > say that FOA has been unfaily neglected which is probably right.) If you don't want to promote Ambisonics, that's your choice, but then it would have been useful not to get in the way of the people who were trying to promote it. 5.1 mixed and recorded in a reasonable way is more or less identical to G-Format. > If you promote G format, 99% would see and listen to this as a 5.1 surround > file. (An 99% would listen to an UHJ as a "stereo file", cos there are really > very few decoders around. In fact, 5.1 seems to be way more mainstream than > decoded UHJ.) G-Format and UHJ are equally useful, because both piggy-back on existing distribution channels and are playback compatible with what's currently used there. I'm not single-mindedly focused on UHJ, however I vehemently reject the idea that UHJ is useless garbage from way back when that one shouldn't promote anymore. As long as most music is produced, distributed and sold as stereo, there's a big opportunity for UHJ, and it can and does provided a throughly enjoyable listening experience, and that's all that counts in the end, not how real it is, or what mathematical imperfections it has. > Therefore, don't push for stereo-matrixed (UHJ) or "pre-encoded" (G format, > 5.1) Ambisonics variants in 2012. In fact, Apple (or Microsoft, "Google > Music" (?), Sony Music Unlimited or whoever sells movies/music) should > firstly offer 5.1 surround files. > It doesn't cost anything to offer another surround format in an online shop, > if music/audio is available in this format. The consumer could chose. And that statement alone shows that you have no idea about business. Choice creates confusion, and confusion costs sales, and sales are money. Why do you think Apple is so successful? Because there are the least amount of choices. Other companies confuse the consumers with oodles of options and choices and consumers don't want to deal with these choices. If you want to buy the latest Madonna single as a teenager, do you really want to read up first on format options, trying to figure out if you sacrifice iPhone playback if you buy the surround version, or buy multiple versions with your limited allowance? That's not going to happen. Music purchases are impulse buys, and any unnecessary choice and option stops the impulse and costs sales. If you were going that route you could possibly try to convince the music industry to have a file format that includes multiple versions of the same track. But that still costs tons of money, because now multiple final mixes have to be made, which unless there's a huge sales potential is just added cost for no tangible benefit (read money, because these companies are not in the business of music, they are in the business of making money). And even if that were successful, then consumers would complain because the files are huge and fill up the limited storage on their iPhones, iPods, etc. much too quickly. (Yes, one could strip the files to certain formats in transfer, but that makes syncing slower, so even that has a cost). In short, none of these technical solutions come at a low enough cost to be worth it unless there's already an established market and demand for surround music. A UHJ mix or a G-format mix for things that are naturally distributed in 5.1 is just that: a single mix. Barely more expensive than a regular stereo mix to make, and that added expense of a slightly more complex mix is the only added expense. Everything else is exactly the same as for any other stereo/5.1 products sold. That brings cost low enough that it doesn't bother the accountants, and therefore that's the way to distribute surround music for the time being. Music videos in G-Format, albums in UHJ stereo. And that's where it's going to be until surround music is the accepted listening habit of a vast number of consumers. Once you have these 100 million plus users in place, then it's time to talk about advancing the state of the art in the living room and recording studios. > But if you offer something beside 5.1 surround, I believe this should be > something better. Not something reduced. Try to find solutions which are > viable for the next 10 or 20 years, and don't go back 20 years. (Sorry for > being slightly polemic, but I think this is a valid argument.) I don't mind the polemic, but its about the facts. The fact is, we have no surround sound market for music to speak of, therefore there is no way of going back to anything. For 99% of people, music is, was and will be stereo, until such point that there's a real market in surround sound music. The question is not, how do we push the envelope of technology, we know how to do that; the question is, how do we sneak surround sound into an industry that has settled on the idea that stereo is good enough; the only way to do that, is to ship a product that's stereo compatible. > Surround tracks are sold via the Internet, there are plenty of existing > online shops. The problem is that you would have to sell 5.1 (or FOA...) > tracks of well-known music, which means "the hits". The Majors are missing > this opportunity. (Plenty of recordings ae available, which means many > thousands.) Tousands is not many. The iTunes store has millions of recordings, and it's still has massive gaps in what it offers. A few audiophile recording outfits peddling a few thousand recordings to a few thousand enthusiasts is not what I call a market. A market is when we talk about hundreds of millions in profits, billions of sales. That's a market. Until there is such a market, and companies that make such markets are getting engaged, Ambisonics is nothing but a academic exercise. > As a musician, I am participating in plenty recordings which are done also in > 5.1. In this sense, don't call me "elitist", or whatever. > But FOA probably won't make it. The time of UHJ has been. If you're right, then surround sound music will not happen in the next three decades at the very least. Plus, why anyone would do a 5.1 recording makes me scratch my head. A soundfield recording delivered predecoded to 5.1 is one thing. The various 5.1 one-microphone-per-speaker recording contraptions that I have seen for native 5.1 recordings are but a joke in my book. > I am not sure that any form of surround will make it into the home, but I > think there is still a real chance that it will happen. The iTunes shop is > currently irrelevant for surround music, and there are more companies around > than Apple. In all of this, Apple is an example, however a particularly relevant one, because they are the leaders today while others are the followers, and because there was once a good chance that Apple would go out on a limb and start offering Ambisonic support in certain products. That particular chance was blown by all the derogatory comments on UHJ, 1st order horizontal-only Ambisonics, and by demands that it should at the very least be third order and other ludicrous demands from a community which instead should have been on their knees asking what they can do to make that first step happen. Apple is about to become the first trillion dollar company, not because they are evil, not because they are a monopoly, but because like no other company, they understand what consumers want, comprehend and can be sold. Imagine just 1% of the iTunes catalog being UHJ, imagine iTunes having support for SuperStereo, and consider what that does to the listening experience. Better than what the entire HOA and 5.1 surround sound music "industry" has been able to deliver for decades, and that's a chance that could realistically be achieved within a few short years, if Apple would decide it's worth their while. It's not going to be worth their while if most consumers don't know what it is, and those people who know what it is, just bitch that it's not the pinnacle of what's theoretically possible. No company, Apple or any other, will enter a market that consists of people who don't demand the product and perfectionists who reject it. At that point, inaction is the best course for such a company, and that's exactly where Ambisonics has been caught for decades now. As long as attitudes don't change and people are not satisfied to start with a bowl of rice and keep demanding a T-bone steak instead, that long they will simply remain hungry, because nobody is going to give them steak. Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
