Quote:
Originally Posted by cyrano
With ambisonics, you record in First order (4 mics), or HOA (Higher order, >4 mics). The rest is math...
Look at ATK (Ambisonics Tool Kit) for starters. It's made for Reaper and it's free. In the ambi scene, most are using Reaper.
http://www.ambisonictoolkit.net/documentation/reaper/
I've wandered away from 8 speakers personally, because of practical restrictions of my room. But I won't even pretend I know what I'm doing 
I'm still experimenting with my first ambisonic mic. It's DIY and isn't calibrated. I'm trying to figure out that part. It is however, nice to have around, as it saved my ass recently, when my main pair sounded dreadful. |
See, that's the problem or disconnect I have when I try to look into this.
That explanation makes it sound like a format for capturing naturally occurring 3D sound and then with the ability to scale that down to lesser speaker arrays when necessary. Which is all truly well and good. Scaling that to binaural stereo for headphones is truly all well and good. But that sounds like a wholly inappropriate format for a surround music mix!
I could say that another way...
Right now, there are always some old school things you do in a mix. Placing an element in a discrete channel for example. It sounds like the statement is "Stop doing that!" In ambisonic you sit in whatever array you have and use your joysticks and just mix. Which is still what you do now with 5.1 when you break it down. Except that throws away the attention to specific speakers with discrete elements and that whole bag of tricks.
Let's I want to go so far to say that would be an improvement? Some of those tricks come about to make mixes translate better to lesser systems. That leads to now everyone would need a reference quality speaker array to hear a mix properly. In the same way that you need good quality stereo speakers properly aligned and calibrated to hear a phantom center clearly. Otherwise it gets wishy washy.