Well I’ll put it this way. For video SOTA is trivial. LG OLED if up to 88” is okay for you otherwise you get:
https://electronics.sony.com/tv-video/projectors/all-projectors/p/vplgtz380
Plus the screen you like or the Sony engineer recommended.
Literally no arguments from anyone. Maybe a few alternatives.
After all it’s just light on a 2D. 4K is sufficient resolution some will argue 8k fine let them argue. Then contrast ratio. Which fundamentally is limited by your light control which can go up to the level of fitting black velvet on all your walls and black carpet. There you have it. SOTA? Done deal.
With audio it’s like a religion. It’s all about beliefs. Audyssey is SOTA. If you bought an audyessy xt product (still being sold) and took it home and let it calibrate and BELIEVED that it was “so much better” because oh marketing maybe. Then you became a believer.
Now read this:
https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...sey-multeq-vs-multeq-xt-vs-multeq-xt32.14786/
Let’s just be thankful everyone was kind enough to refrain from calling multeq xt “hot garbage”. Because fundamentally that’s what it was. I bet back then you thought it was all figured out. This product came from “smart engineers” who “knew what they were doing”
For more than 2 decades Yamaha has been advertising how they go to places like the Sydney Opera House etc. and make your 2 channel at home sound like it’s playing there. That’s a bucket of laughs. I’m sure people believed it. They bought that stuff after all.
Here you can see that Multeq xt32 finally applies modern (like all the harman stuff from around 2008 or so) acoustic knowledge to the problem correctly:
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/audyssey-room-eq-review.12746/
Amir is right when he says the kind of stuff they have to put in there is too cheap to store even 2 target curves. Then if you keep reading you will learn it will apply phase/delay independently to each sub but peq is the same for both. Seems half baked to me. Dirac maybe fixes all this? We won’t know for years until someone actually figures out what the black box is doing. Case in point? Multeq XT.
So now you think about this. A mini dsp runs circles around this thing. A $50 raspberry pi runs circles around a mini dsp. An iPhone runs circles around a raspberry pi. A 32 core amd cpu runs circles around an iPhone.
So you can choose to believe what you have is close to the SOTA. There are little mini cults too. The Bose 901 people (they like that sound and I can’t judge or blame them), the SET people, the horn speaker people, the cardioid people, the point source people, the line array people, the electrostat folks, the magnepan folks. The auro3D folks. Probably sounds good but how do you take create 8 channels from what was recorded in one plane from 2 microphones? There is spatial data contained in the phase differential between the 2 channels and so many ways to skin the up mixing cat. You like it. Many like it and that’s great. But it’s a preference that’s all. Maybe I would like it. I would like multi order ambisonic captures better as that can be traced back to a standard. Anything SOTA needs at least that. What were the mic planes and in which directions
You can’t have SOTA with so many opinions and beliefs.
Now you say Dolby doesn’t use dsp in their demo. Apart from the fact that entire Atmos format is based on dsp you mean they don’t use dsp room correction.
Right and they don’t need to. You can create a large enough room that the transition frequency is lower than 80Hz. You put an architect, plus acoustic engineer together and enough real estate why bother with dsp room correction?
In a real SOTA multichannel system the room is the most valuable part of the system. The equipment just needs to put out the required SPL once the room is built and treated and monitors soffited etc.
The entire point of DSP room correction is to bend the laws of physics enough get that performance in a domestic environment. Which is not a trivial thing to do. This is why Dolby doesn’t need DSP but you do.
Audio is a 3 dimensional thing. Creating a SOTA cinema sounding experience in your domestic environment is not easy. It’s just that people can be so overjoyed by all the whizz bang sound effects to not care that the tonality is off.
In fact you are right. It’s just sound who cares? It’s what? A music track + a dialogue track and a bunch of whizz bang effects for entertainment.
The question here is about SOTA so that’s why we care.
Now to even try to answer that we must at least be knowledgeable about what’s going on in the 3D audio world.
Just like computational photography is revolutionizing the photography world and really bending old rules about light hitting the sensor the same is happening in 3D audio.
If one can get over how what they own is 95% SOTA (I’ve personally bought a lot of junk over the years with that line of thinking) then one can open their eyes to what’s out there.
The Japanese want 22.2 for their next broadcast standard. Why? Are they stupid? The standards are flying out there. MPEG.H. 6th order ambisonics.
You may refuse to believe it but we are just now seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of computational audio. Being happy with what you own is a good thing. But having been doing this for a while it doesn’t surprise me anymore to learn that what I used to think was the best thing since sliced bread is now objectively considered crap. Things change, progress happens, stuff gets discovered.
From your perspective we already have it. Just take Trinnov 32 and make it cheaper. Fire all the other engineers involved in 3D audio. Just make them all work on Trinnov 32 for the masses.
If you mean SOTA for today then in terms of dsp room correction it would be hard to argue against the Trinnov 32. But if you SOTA in terms of cinema experience in a domestic environment there is a lot of work being done on so many facets of the problem. A few google searches will help you realize that.