It's currently available with PC solutions and in the Tact 2.2XP for stereo. I have tested the Tact solution but am so far quite skeptical. I see the potential but...
Some points worth discussing:
- Any 5.1 products coming? How applicable is this to 5.1? They suggest dropping
the center channel.
- Can it work reliably and with the same parameters from one recording to the next? I think it can't till recordings are mixed with this system too. My results are very uneven. Changing for example the spread parameter just a bit can greatly change the sound. What are the correct parameters? Just fiddling and listening seems not to give stable results.
My mistake, what I was thinking of was called ambisonics (no o after the i), and a Google search on the term will bring back several relevant hits. It (ambisonics) has been around for a good 30+ years and never had any commercial success, very much a niche thing.
Not the same thing but related. Ambiophonics simply wants to make sure your left ear only hears the left loudspeaker and your right the right loudspeaker. As a result you are supposed to hear what the mic heared. To achieve this the left and right loudspeakers send cancellation sound waves that erase the other speaker's cross talk in the corresponding ear. It's a real time digital filter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhafner /forum/post/14643318
Not the same thing but related. Ambiophonics simply wants to make sure your left ear only hears the left loudspeaker and your right the right loudspeaker. As a result you are supposed to hear what the mic heared. To achieve this the left and right loudspeakers send cancellation sound waves that erase the other speaker's cross talk in the corresponding ear. It's a real time digital filter.
That is an inter-aural cross cancellation process. That is what Carver's Sonic Holography was but that was only first order. Lexicon's Panorama is based on the same idea but higher order and is adjustable to your speaker angle where the Carver process you had to change your speaker angle to make it work properly.
Ambiophonics was a bit more then just this though. He also used a bunch of reverb processors to generate reverb (hall sound) played back through many speakers within his giant room. Originally he used a physical wall to separate left from right at your ears but now is doing it electronically.
Yep, in addition to the two you mentioned, Polk called it SDA. My all time favorite implementation (sarcasm), and I am NOT kidding, was a guy who was promoting building a wall between the loudspeakers that went all the way up to the listeners head.
lol, thanks for the info. To this day I will never forget the picture in A/V Interiors of a listening room with the wall going down the middle of the room up to the listening chair. Well if that's the guy, then I give anything he is involved in about a .0000001 percent chance of achieving any commercial success.
Here you go, they link to a pic on that website! LOL! I'm sure the wife will love this. And it just looks like such a damn comfortable way to listen to music.
Sorry for going OT mhafner, it's just too good to pass up.
I do hold out hopes that one day we will see more discrete channels, which is the true way to achieve even greater realism and envelopment. Tom Holman tried very hard to convince them to include more channels for Blu Ray and HD, as they could have easily accommodated it. He promotes 10.2.
Now, he has a setup which requires listening from a directly centered position only. I have attached a picture from the 2007 Home Entertainment Show with the listeners confined by rows of chairs to a single-file line. Ralph Glasgal, btw, is second from the left.
It is totally impractical but that sort of thing makes a big difference in imaging though. You will feel like an idiot for trying it but take a cushion off your couch and listen to your system holding it up to your nose like a 'wall'.
"Now, he has a setup which requires listening from a directly centered position only. "
That is the cross cancellation, it results in a very narrow sweet spot where it works properly. Its really wild the first time you hear this in action. In the Lexicon's they had a calibration tone you used to set it up. When you had it set up properly you would hear the tone on just the right side or just the left side. Until you moved out of the sweet spot and heard that both speakers were in fact playing the tone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sfogg /forum/post/14644908
Kal,
"Now, he has a setup which requires listening from a directly centered position only. "
That is the cross cancellation, it results in a very narrow sweet spot where it works properly. Its really wild the first time you hear this in action. In the Lexicon's they had a calibration tone you used to set it up. When you had it set up properly you would hear the tone on just the right side or just the left side. Until you moved out of the sweet spot and heard that both speakers were in fact playing the tone.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kal Rubinson /forum/post/14644796
Now, he has a setup which requires listening from a directly centered position only. I have attached a picture from the 2007 Home Entertainment Show with the listeners confined by rows of chairs to a single-file line. Ralph Glasgal, btw, is second from the left.
Looking at that picture I feel bad for mocking this. He has obviously devoted many years of his life to this and I'm sure it's a huge passion for him. It's just sort of sad, because he will spend a lifetime promoting this but it seems to me it has no chance of ever achieving any commercial success.
Quote:
Originally Posted by QQQ /forum/post/14645007
Looking at that picture I feel bad for mocking this. He has obviously devoted many years of his life to this and I'm sure it's a huge passion for him. It's just sort of sad, because he will spend a lifetime promoting this but it seems to me it has no chance of ever achieving any commercial success.
I understand completely. He is one of a number of people I have come across who are totally dedicated to a particular element of performance or technology despite coming up against issues of practicality and acceptance. In the long run, they do contribute to our general knowledge and understanding.
.... to achieve this the left and right loudspeakers send cancellation sound waves that erase the other speaker's cross talk in the corresponding ear
I think this is another one of those ideas that sounds good, but the act of trying to cancel the opposing signnal results in unwanted frequency response effects. There is a frequency dependent time delay and also diffraction around the head, and you can't simply cancel that with a spaced pair of loudspeakers. More digital hocus-pocus. One of the headphone oriented websites has a good discussion of this, but I don't remember which one.
My listening tests show me that there is huge potential from stereo alone but also severe drawbacks.
The current Tact implementation is lacking. Especially given it's Tact they should go for a proper integrated implementation where you don't fiddle with parameters but measure the sound at the listening spot just like for regular room correction but this time with a dummy stereo head and compute the correct filter for the room correction and cross talk cancellation at the same time. The stereo head would probably give better results for room correction alone than the current approach. If they manage to get artifact free results for the sweet spot the only remaining problem is that recordings are not mixed this way and you don't hear what the sound engineer heard. To fix this studios would have to use this approach and make sure the mixes work well with and without cross cancellation.
Perhaps, but IMO the benefits are overwhelming. My statement *assumes* of course that the recordings themselves would be in surround sound and done properly (too many people have been turned off by surround sound for music because of absurd overdone recordings). There is no way for conventional speaker technology to reproduce the ambiance of a concert hall from only two discrete speakers. The more discrete channels, the closer we can come to recreating the experience. Others will disagree.
When using ambiophonics in a 5.1 Surround system you need to enter the settings of your DVD-Player and enable: "no center speaker". The speakers in the front should be then placed right and left of the TV (As long as the angle is less than 30°). In a fully blown Ambiophonic system, you have two or more subwoofers so all you need is a second Subwoofer. Make sure the crossover between the Subwoofer and the Surround speakers is at 90Hz. It's ok to be lower, but if it's higher, the Subwoofer will be localizable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhafner /forum/post/14639058
- Can it work reliably and with the same parameters from one recording to the next? I think it can't till recordings are mixed with this system too. My results are very uneven. Changing for example the spread parameter just a bit can greatly change the sound. What are the correct parameters? Just fiddling and listening seems not to give stable results.
Personally I do not use sound correction for Ambiophonics, nor a Computer. I use a physical sound barrier (Which should be 6cm thick with rockwool on either side and reach up to the ceiling) with 6 Ambio speakers. Using no digital room correction forces me to do room treatment in the listening room. Using Fiberglass, Rockwool and Large corner-basstraps I managed to bring the reverberation times down to less than 0.2 seconds. This will definitely offer a better sound quality than a PC with room correction.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhafner /forum/post/14639058
Yes, but technology advances, and using cancellation waves it might be possible to use ambiophonics even in cinemas and rooms for more people, however that is a very complex thing to do, and I doubt that will be possible in the next decade.
Quote:
Originally Posted by QQQ /forum/post/14645007
Looking at that picture I feel bad for mocking this. He has obviously devoted many years of his life to this and I'm sure it's a huge passion for him. It's just sort of sad, because he will spend a lifetime promoting this but it seems to me it has no chance of ever achieving any commercial success.
It's a valid point, though. Most people would just buy a good pair of headphones and call it a day.
The same concept is used in binaural recordings. Done well (for your ears), it sounds amazing. There are some drawbacks, but it's easily the best rendering of 3D positional audio I've ever heard. MGM had a demo of it in a booth in their FL theme park shortly after opening. When you put the headphones on and close your eyes, you can't tell you're in the booth anymore. It literally sounds like you're in the middle of the scene they created.
Nice thing about it is you can render an infinite number of channels with relativly inexpensive recording & playback gear. Bad thing is you have to wear headphones, sacrafice quality through electronic crosstalk filters, or place a sound absorbing wall up against your face.
"but it's easily the best rendering of 3D positional audio I've ever heard. MGM had a demo of it in a booth in their FL theme park shortly after opening. When you put the headphones on and close your eyes, you can't tell you're in the booth anymore. It literally sounds like you're in the middle of the scene they created."
Binaural is one of those funny things, it is extremely realistic sounding while at the same time also obviously very fake. Turn your head a little and the entire scene turns with you.
Shawn
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