Re: [LAU] more than 4 channels for listening? Really?

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:28:43PM -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 5:53 PM, Monty Montgomery <xiphmont@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> > ("Why didn't Ambisonics win then?" you ask... well, it requires signal
> > processing that was hideously expensive at the time of its
> > introduction, and the 'add another full channel for each speaker
> > approach' was far cheaper and more practical at the time. ?Today, the
> > average cereal box contains more computing power than used to land on
> > the Moon, so I think the Ambisonics approach is suddenly the
> > easier/cheaper way to do things. Excepting of course that the discrete
> > channel method has a huge installed base. ?For that reason, Ambisonics
> > is still 'weird' and 'fringe',)
>
> you missed out another important reason. the technology behind
> ambisonics is now effectively public domain. there is no money to be
> made licensing it to other companies. discrete channel "surround" is
> still subject to licensing arrangements, which in turns creates
> incentives for license holders to keep using what they paid for and
> for license issuers to keep using their IP to generate as much revenue
> as possible.

Ah, but there's then a built-in incentive for someone wanting to compete, to use the free/public-domain alternative and increase their profits by not having to pay license fees. That'd mostly be the case if the license fees are per-unit or annual dues; if they're per-unit then one could theoretically increase profits and/or compete on price by removing that cost.

Although, if you'd have to include the licensed thing anyway as an alternative because nobody'd actually buy the product without it, then we're right back into the same kind of monopolistic compatibility/marketshare trap that have shut out free alternatives to everything for decades. Oh well, nothing to see here, move along....

>
> sound on sound covered ambisonics as part of their excellent series on
> surround several years ago:
>
> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct01/articles/surroundsound3.asp <=
> ambisonics article
> http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Aug01/articles/surroundsound1.asp <=
> first article of several on surround

Cool stuff.

-ken
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Received on Sat Feb 27 00:15:06 2010