Today in class we went over the basics of Dolby Atmos mixing in logic but as a precursor to this we looked briefly into ambisonics.
‘Ambisonics is a technology for surround-sound which aims specifically at not making four (or any other number) of loudspeakers audible as separate sources of sound. It is designed using appropriate engineering methods and psychoacoustic theory that has shown good predictive value to make best use of available channels of communication (two or more ), and of loudspeakers’. (Fellgett, 1975) Ambisonics has a unique use case above 5.1 or 7.1 setups for example as it will support as many speakers as you want it to. This allows you to get creative with unique setups for more immersive experiences.
Peter Fellgett (Professor of Cybernetics and Instrument Physics, University of Reading)suggests that ambisonics can be utilised best by:
- Using more loudspeakers.
- Using more channels of communication.
- Making better use of the available number of loudspeakers and channels.
- Extending directional information from the 60˚ frontsector of stereo to a full 360˚ surrounding the listener in the
horizontal plane, or to complete spherical surround reproduction including height. (Fellgett, 1975)
Dolby Atmos most commonly utilises a 7.1.4 speaker setup. this includes seven surrounding speakers, one LFE (Low Frequency Effects) and four overhead speakers. (diagrammed below) The overhead speakers give a wider sense of range on top of the traditional 7.1 surround setup and are used in all Dolby Atmos setups.
We looked into methods of mixing for Dolby Atmos at home using a binaural rendering engine with headphones and how to set this up on logic. I am going to be mixing the group project in this format and will need to take into account how this will sound on such a grandiose speaker setup.
You can get a good grasp of what the sound will be like on this setup with headphones but will never truly know until you listen on the real thing. When mixing for surround it is easy to make certain elements of the song sound isolated or separated due to the size of the audio field so I will be taking this into account when mixing.
Fellgett, P. (1975) (PDF) introduction to Ambisonics. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280010078_Introduction_to_Ambisonics (Accessed: 03 May 2024).