PenteoSurround
03-15-08, 06:58 PM
Not to pee on your discovery, but you are at the end of this high rez format, both are pretty much dead. I wish it were not the case, but people like us are few and far between....
You know what dude, you're right.
But the coolest part is that I now have more demand and more interest in "standard rez" surround upmixing than ever before. It's just starting. Two years of almost no interest at all, and now my phone and email are ringing off the hook. All the way from investors interested in turning into a full-time venture, to the major motion picture producers who want legacy material upconverted.
Pretty soon, you'll have a set of satellite radio channels in 5.1 full time. We already have HDRadio Surround going in to its 2nd year of digital on-air broadcasting for the 5.1 car radio receiver designed around Penteo on WZLX in Boston.
I'm now dedicating my life to the project. It's a tremendous amount of work, because most mixing and mastering of 2-track tapes was never intended to be scrutinized as carefully as a forensic parsing algorithm does. But it can be done, very, very well, with a bit of hand work on each song, working around splices, working parts, and azimuth errors. Ask anyone on this forum who has heard demos about the quality. Who knew that those old Ampex decks could be that rock-stable, and that the tape would physically hold up that well for all these years.
If you don't know how it works, it's based on a forensic comparison of the left vs. right waveforms in a stereo mix, comparing waveform amplitudes and phase. Because it depends on the left and right channel being rock-stable, it is highly dependent on the physical integrity of the plastic (mylar) base that the tape was made out of remaining stable over decades. It works. It only takes about an hour per song, unless there's a lot of tape damage.
It may not be hi-rez versions at 96/24, but it's in every way "surround music", with discrete (>60db) separation between channels, and bringing out instrumental tracks that have been buried for decades. The waveforms and the vectors that make it possible for algorithms to parse them out have always been there; that's how your ears have always been able to have an unlimited number of individual instrument placements inside your head when you're listening on headphones. Now we have software that can do the same thing that your brain does naturally.
The mix engineers and producers back in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s had no idea that they were encoding every stereo mix with the ability to "decode" it into surround, simply by placing specific instruments and tracks in specific locations using pan-pots, that software could come back later and take apart.
While it's true that record companies cannot make money making only audiophiles happy, you can bring surround music in "extremely, extremely good" quality, affordably, in many different pipelines, to the masses.
It's just starting...
=John
You know what dude, you're right.
But the coolest part is that I now have more demand and more interest in "standard rez" surround upmixing than ever before. It's just starting. Two years of almost no interest at all, and now my phone and email are ringing off the hook. All the way from investors interested in turning into a full-time venture, to the major motion picture producers who want legacy material upconverted.
Pretty soon, you'll have a set of satellite radio channels in 5.1 full time. We already have HDRadio Surround going in to its 2nd year of digital on-air broadcasting for the 5.1 car radio receiver designed around Penteo on WZLX in Boston.
I'm now dedicating my life to the project. It's a tremendous amount of work, because most mixing and mastering of 2-track tapes was never intended to be scrutinized as carefully as a forensic parsing algorithm does. But it can be done, very, very well, with a bit of hand work on each song, working around splices, working parts, and azimuth errors. Ask anyone on this forum who has heard demos about the quality. Who knew that those old Ampex decks could be that rock-stable, and that the tape would physically hold up that well for all these years.
If you don't know how it works, it's based on a forensic comparison of the left vs. right waveforms in a stereo mix, comparing waveform amplitudes and phase. Because it depends on the left and right channel being rock-stable, it is highly dependent on the physical integrity of the plastic (mylar) base that the tape was made out of remaining stable over decades. It works. It only takes about an hour per song, unless there's a lot of tape damage.
It may not be hi-rez versions at 96/24, but it's in every way "surround music", with discrete (>60db) separation between channels, and bringing out instrumental tracks that have been buried for decades. The waveforms and the vectors that make it possible for algorithms to parse them out have always been there; that's how your ears have always been able to have an unlimited number of individual instrument placements inside your head when you're listening on headphones. Now we have software that can do the same thing that your brain does naturally.
The mix engineers and producers back in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s had no idea that they were encoding every stereo mix with the ability to "decode" it into surround, simply by placing specific instruments and tracks in specific locations using pan-pots, that software could come back later and take apart.
While it's true that record companies cannot make money making only audiophiles happy, you can bring surround music in "extremely, extremely good" quality, affordably, in many different pipelines, to the masses.
It's just starting...
=John