In article <
abbma1...@mid.individual.net>,
I tried Ambiophonics a number of years ago. It reminded me too much of
the matrix-style "quadraphonic sound of the 1970's . Even with "Steering
Logic" And later with Dolby "Pro Logic", I was never fond of it.
It's not a question of " do we want High-Fidelity" but rather a question
of does a surround process further that goal. In my opinion it does not.
Sitting in a "sweet spot" is not realistic and sound emanating from 4
(or 5) channels is also not realistic, at least, not to me. SACD was
available with multiple channels and even that didn't do what *I*
wanted it to do - which is to say reproduce the ambience and sound of a
good hall and do it realistically.
It's hard enough to get two-channel stereo right (again IMHO) without
going of f on a tangent to try to reproduce the ambience of a hall. I
used to have a device from Philips that had built-in "hall algorithms"
it purported to take the two-channel stereo signal in and output
4-channels with the sound of a certain hall overlaid on it. Some of the
"halls" it supposedly mimicked were Carnegie Hall in NYC, The
Concergetbouw in Amsterdam, Royal Albert Hall in London, Symphony Hall
in Boston etc. I Thought it did a much better job than any Quadraphonic
or Ambiphonic or other multi-channel recording I ever heard. And still,
it had a problem. The recordings, unless they were recorded on an
acoustically dead soundstage - the way movie soundtracks are generally
recorded ('Ben-Hur's' soundtrack sounded great when "played" in Carnegie
Hall!) merely added the algorithm ambience to that of the hall where the
recording was made. Sometimes that was pleasant, and sometimes it
wasn't. If the Philips box hadn't died, I'd likely still be using it!
Don't misunderstand me here, I think Dolby or DTS sound for films is
excellent, it's just music that I don't think is well served by most of
the surround recording formats that I've heard.