[ursamtl]

Originally posted by Eye of Horus

When you write in almost every post how bad the results are from Ambisonics and seldom add IMHO, yes, this is whining and groaning.

EoH, I've been involved with public forum messaging for well over a decade in many contexts, and most people I know consider using "IMHO" on a regular basis to be a sign of arrogance, as if those who use it really considers their opinion to be superior to opposing ones but want to make themselves appear more humble and avoid criticism for being arrogant. NOTE: I am not accusing you of this, just telling you why I avoid using such acronyms because, in my experience, they color the message. It is of course understood that if someone is expressing an idea on a forum and does not supply some sort of reference to another source or some sort of factual data as proof then he or she is obviously expressing his or her opinion, be it humble or otherwise.

This has nothing to do with a personal attack, but simply with the fact that you are constantly saying how bad Ambisonics is for you in this originally Ambisonics thread. I consider your comments about Ambisonics offensive, because 7 out of 10 have another opinion, so you are insulting 7 out of 10 !

This statement proves what I've been saying. If you consider criticism of the Ambisonics method to be "offensive" then you are taking it personally, as an attack on you as a person. I have never intended this! When I discovered your thread, I read it with a great deal of enthusiasm, as if I'd found some sort of holy grail. I wanted Ambisonics to work, but it didn't work for me. The more I read your comments about how superior it was, the more I tried redoing it to see if I'd overlooked anything. Eventually I came to the realization that it represents one approach to surround sound and not the ultimate solution. It is an approach or definition of surround that I personally find disappointing. I like surround sound to reveal something new and hidden in the music, some nuance that stereo couldn't deliver. To my ears, Ambisonics sounded like a collapsed stereo image across the fronts with the same image repeated in the rear speakers. Yes, there is a slight bit of separation, but it sounds to me like someone took a stereo signal and collapsed it to only about 20% of it's original width. I'm sure on a good sound system in a store, it sounds nice, but there's no magic. When I experimented with my bidule, the Gerzon LCR bidules, the AC3filter/MatrixMixer, and simply playing with the many stereo widener plugins, etc., out there, I discovered new sounds within my favorite music. Have you ever tried some of the QSound DirectX plugins? They take instruments that seemed buried in a mix and present them in a new light. Take a simple old Jimi Hendrix recording and run it through one of these and you get some stunning revelatory results. I believe it was you who said the Circle Surround II demo produced the best upmix surround you've yet heard (or perhaps kempfand, I don't have time to go searching through the forum to see who said it). These methods produce what I'm looking for, Ambisonics does not. If you take that statement as an attack on you or consider it offensive, then that's your problem, not mine. Do not make it mine by calling me a "troll" or dismiss my comments as "whining and groaning."

You said something before about us ridiculizing Kpex methods ?
Now you make another suggestive remark.
Come with the facts !

The only one with his constant nagging about Ambisonics and who seems not to get the spirit of this forum is not me : it's you !
When I reacted to your remark about Kpex, you didn't come back with a "sorry". Not that I am waiting for that, but you set the tone ! Not me, I only react.

Look, I don't have the time or desire to go searching back through every thread I've read over the last couple of months to quote examples of where I felt you were berating people. All I know is that I got that impression. If I'm wrong, I apologize, but that was how it seemed to me. If I remember correctly, you implied that kpex's SAD5.1 method was sort of a lowest possible benchmark, when you said that even it was better than mine. I seem to recall reading other comments where you implied it wasn't very good. Given my disappointing experiences with your Ambisonics method, can you not understand why I felt it unfair that you would berate someone else's method?

You stated clearly that your method gave you a better result. The first one you posted was completely wrong.

No, this statement is completely wrong! I already explained to you that my first bidule worked perfectly on the software I downloaded from needfulthings. The version of Kelly Industries BassManager in the needfulthings zipped file was 0.3. Check the Kelly Industries web site. It states very clearly that they changed the pinouts to the ITU standard in their v0.5. Still, they haven't changed their interface to match.

The second should be fine. Well perhaps for your ears, but till now I have heard 3 negative experiences and not one positive one (except your own of course). When I say something about that you feel attacked ? I would consider it a remark to stimulize you to come up with something working

Yes it did sound fine to my ears. I've also explained some possible reasons why there have been two other negative responses, the lack of adequate monitoring to achieve the levels required being the most probable. A professional recording studio monitors the mix of a recording while it is being mixed and using some sort of reproduction matching the mixing format. Look at section 0.8 your ambisonic guide. It suggests monitoring the front and rear lefts through the same left channel and the front and rear rights through the right channel. All that can give is a notion that the sound is present and at a certain loudness level. It cannot possibly give any sense of a surround mix. I have already said that the bidule I presented requires at least a 4.0 setup for monitoring to be effective. Every individual song requires such monitoring to bring out the best combination of factors. Perhaps a classical recording or a live performance recording could be set once and then left for the duration of the entire recording, but a modern studio album of popular music is full of many variations and nuances that require different approaches. For example, if the vocals were recorded with a lot of stereo reverb, this will dominate the rear dry level in my bidule and thus the wet level in SIR should be brought down. If the rears are without much reverb then the opposite is true. If the bass is tight and punchy already, then the LFE level needs to be brought down or it will overwhelm the final mix. If the original stereo mix was quite wide, the center level needs to be higher to avoid a washed out sound. If it was overly narrow, then bringing the front lefts and rights up with provide a nicer sense of a soundstage. But, if the fronts are too high, then a good vocal performance will lose its distinctiveness. I prefer this kind of approach because it allows me to tailor my mix to the music. Even if I put a separate gain on each channel in your Ambisonics bidule (which I've done), I don't have this kind of control to tailor the final mix. It just changes the balance of the overall sound the same way a balance control on a traditional stereo system works.

Till now I sense more pretentions than inventions !
You put down Ambi, every time, you would come up with something better, but didn't.

Surely if you read the detailed description of mixing levels I just wrote with any sense of objectivity, you must see that I didn't just throw my bidule together for fun, I did put some thought into it. You may not agree with the methodology or the results, but you cannot dismiss it as "pretention." That's an arrogant word that I consider offensive. No I don't consider my bidule an "invention" by any means and I do give you credit for presenting your application of Ambisonics as an approach to upmixing. I do not agree with you when you make a sweeping, absolute statment such as "Realistic space can only be achieved by Ambisonics and certainly not by separation." Unfortunately, I get the sense that just because I disagree with this, you feel I'm some sort of competitor or enemy of yours and so you dismiss me as a "acting like a troll" or "whining and groaning." EoH, if you feel offended that I criticized your Ambisonics method, I'M SORRY. Now, get over it!