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Yes, there is.
www.princeton.edu
This is very cool. I dabbled a bit in Ambisonics. It’s a very cool technology. I even have the sennheiser ambeo headset microphone here. I haven’t played with it much to be honest. (It’s only $50 and probably most audio geeks would do well to play with one).
It’s all very cool and has some amazing applications i’m sure. But is listening to studio recorded stereo music one of them?
This is basically binaural being reproduced in an actual space with loudspeakers.
The microphone techniques used to record binaural are completely different from what was used to make 99% of recorded music. It’s the sad truth.
Maybe it works pretty well for certain minimal microphone techniques used for classical recordings. However I can’t see this as something to use for studio created recordings. The entire protocol is different for those.
I wish we had a million 3rd order ambisonics recordings and cheap ways to play those back in a real space. From what limited research I did it’s very hard. There are limits on how big the sweetspot can be vs bandwidth capability.
The real application for that kind of higher order ambisonics is a multiplayer VR simulation space.
However this is not fully ambisonics. It’s more about binaural. Personally I would just wear headphones to listen to that one off binaural recording.
In fact I had 2 very nice binaural experiences as a kid. One was the well known barber shop hairdryer one at Epcot center. I believe this can be found on YouTube or other places.
The other was this guy who told stories and made all kinds of noises with his voice into a microphone. I forgot his name. His recordings were binaural and I really enjoyed them on my Walkman. Incredible sounding.
Now I don’t understand why one would go through the trouble of this for loudspeakers. (Maybe someone can help me with this concept especially with there being only one sweetspot). Headtracking headsets would be much better. Even for ambisonics let’s face it. Who can afford to put 64 speakers up in their listening space? Just get some nice headphones like the ones Valve made for their index headset.
This is all amazing research and I have a ton of respect for all of it. The best application is really VR. At the very least video games in general.
I wish more recordings were recorded in binaural then maybe I might want the loudspeaker version of it because I don’t like wearing headphones. However what valve did is a nice alternative. Maybe just a band around the head with those 2 BMR drivers.
It’s sad in a sense that music for sale or consumption is made as a product. There is no reference room or any band playing in said room. Literally tracks laid down by artists who could be on other sides of the planet are mixed together to create a product for consumption. The mixing engineer may be more important than the performer for our purposes.
How did they mix? They put two monitors in front of their face and mixed. My current setup replicates that.
If it were indeed a band playing in a space and a dummy head had 2 microphones in it then I would need this system.
This is basically a whole new format. It would take a massive change in the music industry and this software would have to be licensed and added to regular AVRs and car stereos.
Also everything he says about “optimal crosstalk” seems to be zero crosstalk.
It’s a loss on many fronts in the music industry. Apparently even in the 50s some companies wanted not stereo but 3 channel. It didn’t happen.
In the 70s we had ambisonics and quad. All failed. Even SACD and DVD-A are total failures.
I want some of this stuff but most people don’t care.
Realistically I would need to wear those sennheiser ambeo headsets to a concert that hopefully would get a live album release. Then compare the recordings.
Probably I would not care for my recoding with all kinds of distracting ambience of crowds. For classical concerts it could be a game changer. Classical music does not drive the industry unfortunately.
For all other types of concerts I would probably want the nice studio recording for playback on my regular 2 channel stereo. If someone did a nice 5.1 mix I would try that. But 2.5x my budget for so few recordings is a bit too rich for my blood. I’m still working on finishing my 2 channel system to the desired level of fidelity.
It’s nice they have commercialized this research. It’s very cool and I hope they get all the funding they need and more.
As a listener I suppose it would appeal mainly to classical listeners. Even then that is hard to say. You go to a classical performance and yes there is the idea of hearing that one flute and it’s coming from the right a bit from the middle of the performers. But the funny thing is the location of the performers is not really the point of listening to classical music.
It’s nice to have. But what most listeners want is an idea of the space and the acoustics of great music halls of the world. Yamaha was pushing this stuff back in the 90s. They went and measured a bunch of them and claimed their receivers would place your music in those spaces for you.
Maybe it actually worked if you listened in a treated room. But it never caught on because most people didn’t have that. For most people it was like okay there’s some added sense of space here. Probably unnatural to listen to rock or pop run through that DSP.
So there is this very precise sense of space and location that this technology can replicate. This fly around your head thing. It’s cool. But what we really want is “good enough”. Do I hear the instruments? Does it sound like it’s coming from a reasonable space?
This project/product does seems to target a certain demographic with specific music tastes and recording techniques with specific goals. Demo discs are fun don’t get me wrong but I can’t live off of those.
Edit: This sort of thing is going to be great for people who create VR software. No doubt valve corporation has this running on several machines. They would just buy 50 licenses of the top end version.
