Engineering the immersive sound experience

Take a few minutes to read this story about 2L:

https://immersiveaudioalbum.com/2020/06/qa-with-morten-lindberg-2020-grammy-winner/

Maybe Geoff might chime in and say how B&O aligns or differs and why.

Fascinating. I like the “map one mic to one speaker” philosophy. I’ll have to explore their catalogue.

Thanks for sharing, Barry.

Lawrence

Howdy,

I'm not sure that there's much for me to say about this article from B&O's perspective... 

Speaking as a former recording engineer, there are some things that I firmly agree with - most notably:

• that there's a "translation" between headphones and loudspeakers. You can learn the difference - but you always have to rememver that they're different
• A recording is not intended to re-create a live experience. I say this every time we have someone visiting B&O... When you watch Star Wars, you should feel like you're in the Millenium Falcon - you're watching a story. Music recordings are the same. (Maybe that's the B&O perspective - we never try to make systems that make you think "you are there" or "they are here". We just try to make systems that faithfully reproduce what the recording and the mastering engineers heard when they did the recording.)

The one-mic-per-loudspeaker philosophy is common. Pentatone does this for multichannel well. MANY 2.0 classical recordings are done this way - especially the smaller-label ones. It puts all the work up-front, because you can't "fix it in the mix" later.  This technique can be done well (Morten does a good job!) and it can be done very poorly as well - so it's not a solution, it's "just" a philosophy.

If you're either interested in the math and psychoacoustics behind this philosophy of recording for multichannel, or you have trouble sleeping, you might find that this paper helps...

Cheers
-geoff

 

Sorry... big error in there... That should have read

"When you watch Star Wars, you should NOT feel like you're in the Millenium Falcon - you're watching a story."

I type faster than I can think... And I don't type very fast...

-g

No problem, Geoff - just blame it on the hot summer weather  ;-)

Ah. when I read your initial response, I was a little confused. I agree with the B&O approach. I want to hear what the artist intended vs. trying to create a live performance.