Ambisonics

[giscus[bot]]

Ambisonics

Spatial audio’s pretty cool, but the largest format for it, Dolby Atmos¹, is proprietary and is quite difficult to work with. Since Atmos is a proprietary black box, it’s impossible to design hardware or software that uses it without paying a large sum of money, and, since it’s so complicated, Atmos-enabled hardware needs powerful processing inside to be able to decode the audio. While there are some proposed protocols that fix the problem of licensing costs, only one fixes the problem of DSP load as well, and it’s been hiding around since the 70s (well, not exactly hiding, but still).

1. I’m not affiliated with either Dolby or Ambisonics, nor an expert at either. ↩

https://apollofops.net/news/audio/ambisonics.html