Ambisonics
Ambisonics is a series of techniques to record and replay a sound field.
Ambisonics is a series of techniques to record and replay a sound
field. By means of encoding and decoding sound information on a number
of channels, a 2- or 3-dimensional sound field can be presented.
Ambisonic was mainly developed by Michael Gerzon and Peter Fellgett in
the early 1970s.
In contrast to more common playback systems such
as stereo or Dolby surround, ambisonics tries to resynthesize the
represented sound field mathematically correct. Therefore sounds
arriving from all directions are treated equally. All speakers are
generally used to localise a sound in any directions. As a result the
number of speakers is flexible. This portability of the format makes it
easy to adapt an ambisonics-encoded signal to different loudspeaker
settings. The elevation level can be decoded for any loudspeaker
position. Thus a three-dimensional sound field is already presented
with four loudspeaker channels. Conventional formats are even with 6
channels only be able to present a two dimensional sound field.