On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 05:53:15PM -0500, Monty Montgomery wrote: > > I am currently in the process of building an eight-channel ambisonics setup in > > my home-office. Size is about 3x3x2.5 meters. > > To be clear--- > > You do mean a three channel first-order setup with eight speakers, correct? > > To answer questions a few others asked, It's not that a bunch of > channels are needed, rather that more speakers are needed to fill gaps > in the wavefront imaging. quad/5.1/7.1/etc takes an ad-hoc approach > to this by adding more and more fully discrete channels to 'plug > holes' while Ambisonics takes a methodical approach that simply adds > more speakers to the already constructed/encoded model. > > ("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',) With four speakers AMB can give good - and in particular musically pleasant - results, but using six improves things. What does not work in my experience is 5.1 transcoded to 1st order AMB, in that case just using the original signals with C distributed to L and R works better. But 5.1 recoded to 2nd order AMB over six speakers seems to work well. I'd start with at least six, given the choice. Ciao, -- FA O tu, che porte, correndo si ? E guerra e morte ! _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user