| 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 Mac OS 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. |
