Ambisonics

Ambisonics is not a product, but a technique for storing the spatial information of a position of a sound. It can be used for free by anyone. Spatializing sound by the ambisonic- method is basically processing (encoding) the sound through the use of several equations. This is done by using an encoding and decoding process. That way a precise x, y and z karthesian -coordinate in space is assigned to every sound. The x, y and z components of the sound are stored in seperate audio-tracks. These tracks contain the whole directional information, lossless and without redundancies. In a second step the derived encoded tracks are decoded to the desired speaker-setup, which may be a stereo-setup, a hexagon, an octagon, a cube or any other symmetrical layout of speakers.
The Ambisonic Method was developed by Michal Gerzon, originally to archive a better way of spatial representation in microphoned sounds. Research on Ambisonics is done at the Universities of York and Derby Richard Furse and Dave Malham developed the 2nd Order Equations for Ambisonic decoding. Compared to first Order, 2nd order Ambisonics has the advantage of producing even more precisely localisable sound-images in every desired direction and a larger "sweet-spot" at the centre. For more information about 2nd order Ambisonics, encoding equations and the Furse- Malham Set of decoding- equations see Richard Furses pages.