Ambisonics: a production
standard to answer the proliferation of multichannel
playback formats
This 30-minute lecture, in French, presented a historical
overview of Ambisonics
going back to the group of students
who initiated the project in 1968 at Oxford in
England. The milestone that is the Soundfield
microphone was presented and the more recent
incarnation of tetrahedral microphone arrays like the SoundField
SPS200 and the Core
Sound TetraMic were also mentioned to illustrate the
filiation to the first
tetrahedral microphone array in 1971.
The conversion from tetrahedral A-Format to B-Format
was briefly explained and it was also stated that the
B-Format is expandable to allow for greater
performance in spatial resolution. The Ambisonic
Studio B2X plug-ins were presented and a short audio
demo followed where the plug-ins were used in Steinberg
Nuendo 4.2.2 in conjunction with Plogue
Bidule 0.9686 in macOS 10.5.6. The MacBook
Pro was connected to a RME
Fireface 400 audio interface.
This demo featured 1st order B-Format recordings by John
Leonard, available on Ambisonia,
and generative music with random positioning in 5th order
planar B-Format. Note that the audio is in mono in the
video.
The lecture concluded with the statement that Ambisonics
B-Format is a future-proof surround sound format since it
can be adapted to any multichannel speaker arrays.
The lecture included pictures courtesy of Core
Sound, SoundField
and Stephen
Thornton.
|