Introduction
There exists an affluent, elite group of classical music
lovers, high-fidelity enthusiasts, audiophiles, and musicians who value
realism in music reproduction above all other considerations. Ambiophonics,
a public domain technology supported by the non-commercial Ambiophonics
Institute, is a no holds barred methodology designed to appeal to such
devoted listeners and displace stereophonics as their preferred route
to audio nirvana. Thus Ambiophonics is deliberately configured to enhance
acoustic and virtual music recording and reproduction and makes no compromises
in fidelity to accommodate movie sound tracks, off-stage direct sound
sources or listening by large groups.
The goal of Ambiophonics is to deliver to one or two home
listeners a realistic replica of the concert hall experience. In this
context, realism does not necessarily need to equate to accuracy. A
recording made in Carnegie Hall but played back in Avery Fisher Hall
can seem very real but is not accurate. Ambiophonics aims to provide
a concert-hall, opera house, church, cathedral, theater, rock pavilion,
etc. musical experience, at home that the brain will accept as real.
Real, not accurate and not necessarily perfect just as real concert
halls are not ideal.
The Ambiophonic method
[1] combines an exploitation of under-appreciated psychoacoustic
principles [2, 3,
4] with the basic rules
of good musical performance-space design [5,
6, 7]
to create believable concert-hall soundfields in a home listening room.
Ambiophonics moves the listener into the same space as the performers
by accommodating to individual pinna characteristics, [8,
9] minimizing interaural
correlation at the listening positions, abandoning the traditional stereo
loudspeaker triangle (including the center speaker in 5.1), generating
early reflections and reverberant fields from a library of stored real-hall
impulse responses, and using room correction/treatment technology to
insure that listening room early and late reflections are essentially
inaudible. Fig. 1
Ambiophonic reproduction of music combines crosstalk cancellation,
[10] novel speaker placement
and shape, and real hall ambience convolvers (Ambiovolvers) feeding
surround loudspeakers to achieve the holy grail of binaural technology
i.e. delivering to each ear an almost exact replica of what that ear
would have heard if it had been at the microphone position during the
live performance. Fig. 2
The reason that there are already so many references cited
in just the first few paragraphs of this paper is that I would be the
first to concede that there is nothing about Ambiophonic technology
that I did not find in the existing literature after I thought to search
for it. That there is nothing new under the sun is not as extraordinary
as that all this preexisting research has been so resolutely ignored.
Ambiophonics has been shown [1,
11] to be remarkably
compatible with and able to reproduce existing two channel classical
music LPs, CDs and DVDs with realism, despite the variety of microphone,
equalization, mixing, and panning techniques employed. If we define
stereo as Blumlein did just meaning reproduction via the equilateral
speaker triangle, rather than including all two channel recording methods,
it is clear that most two-channel recordings are not usually, if ever,
inherently stereo. That is, there is nothing basic in the recording
process, using microphones or virtual sound processors, that relies
on the facts that the localization will be by phantom imaging, that
stage width will be restricted to the angle between the speakers, that
there will be pinna angle errors and head shadowing errors for central
sources, unpredictable comb filtering, rear and side ambience coming,
instead, from the front, and so on.
While recording engineers in control rooms may monitor
their creations using the stereo triangle there is little they can do
to compensate for these problems in their mixes. Almost all panning
programs for virtual reality recordings are likewise deficient in most
of these areas. Thus one can say that many so-called stereo recordings
can be made to sound more realistic using a binaural technology to play
them back than they normally would. Most existing recordings are not
inherently stereophonic, (in the reproduction sense) even if two channel.
