Ambisonic Tutorial

AMBISONICS TUTORIALINTRODUCTIONAmbisonic has several advantages compared to other surroundsound- techniques:- It supports perifony (meaning the inclusion of the height component of sound)- The image is stable and precise, independent from the position of the virtual sound(coming from the speaker or from a point in-between the speakers). This means thatthe sound does not change, as it moves around; thus the sound gets liberated fromthe speakers.- The position of the listener is not that important for getting a true localisation as it isin most other surroundsound-techniques. Even listeners far off the sweet spot stillperceive a realistic image.- Once the sound is spatially encoded it can be decoded for performance to any desiredspeaker-setup, as long it is symmetric.- Ambisonics is free and efficient.- It can be combined with the distance -clues of the virtual sound source, resulting tosounds, which are perceived as being closer or more distant to the listener.THE AMBISONIC FORMATThe spatial reproduction with Ambisonics splits up into two basic parts:1. Encodingand2. Decoding.ENCODINGIn the encoding part a soundsource is either recorded with a soundfield microphone, orangle and elevation co-ordinates are assigned via the encoding equations to any arbitrarymono source (soundfile/ speech/ instrument/ synthesized/ microfoned) with a computer.The result are 4 Audio Tracks (W, X, Y, Z) in First Order Ambisonics or 9 Audio Tracks (W,X, Y, Z, R, S, T, U ...