Call me crazy but…………………….
Dear Surround purists
Just thought I would fill you guys in on my cunning plan to rule the surround world with an iron fist (thinking about rolling through Poland and crushing France). Yes I am writing this from deep within my underground lair.
THE DOLBY DOMINATION
Those of you that know and indeed “love” us would know that we are in fact old school quadraphile surround nutters and we firmly believe that the surround took a wrong turn in the mid 1980’s when Dolby released their original Prologic 1 system. Commercially it was a master stroke as it offered a simple “band aid” quick fix to the major problems of the 70’s quadraphonic era. These were:
1 Non standardisation of formats – Dolby were really the first LOGO that had become “standard” in the public mind as a result of their domination of the cassette noise reduction market from the mid 1960’s. People had begun to accept if it was Dolby it was the standard – even if it was inferior.
2 Dolby adopted the myth that we could not directionalize bass under 80 Hz. This was great commercially as the major CE’s could spend less on the 4 or 5 main boxes and reduce their visual size
3 Quad only really worked in the one central seat of the room, move left or right and the central vocal went hard left or right. The center channel provided a stable point . The initial Prologic 1 was very dumb and only summated left and right but did not remove hard left or right components – this resulted in a diminished left right stage width. In addition the center sound came from UNDER the TV not from where the actual image should have been. But still it sorta solved an issue, and so the messed up surround era we are in now was born.
From a technical point of view I say it was a complete mess but from a commercial perspective it was a master stroke.
Subsequent to this Dolby released their much improved PL2 that offered improved center channel separation and better rear full bandwidth decode thanks to Tate / Fosgate. Only real problem was that it still suffered badly in comparison to true discrete media in terms of image smear and separation. Along came the digital world with bigger data storage capacity and speeds, next thing you know the DVD’s released movie sound tracks in 5.1 channels of compressed and some uncompressed discrete surround.
This was a great improvement to accuracy but still had issues of poor cross compatibility with the user having to use menu systems to select the appropriate format, high bandwidth overhead prohibiting transmission on radio, TV, Mp3, Youtube, CD’s, Ipods, records, cassette’s, internet TV etc. In addition most recordings just offered 70% of sound coming from UNDER the TV with the odd ping sound coming from the left/ right and rear (really side) speakers. Clearly this really did not produce a true sound “environment”.
Still it is the Dolby LOGO that actually unites and drives the surround revival.
What next? As most of you will know Dolby have been travelling down the wave field synthesis road with the release of Dolby Atmos. The system requires bundles of channels and goes to around 60 channels for cinemas. The current psychology of all the “sheep” in the industry is that if it does not work with 5.1 channels then you need 7.1…..9.1…..12.2……..22.2…….66…….300 and yes I have heard of 900 channels. All I can say is that upwards of 5.1 channels is not actually being used by the bulk of the population. Wives won’t let you do it!!!!
Dolby have a secondary problem – if Atmos dies the death it deserves then what next? Strikes me they are running out of patents, wonder what that will do to their share price? DTS have acquired SRS for $140 million and are sure to be snapping at their heals.
THE GREAT “RECIEVER” DEBACLE
Ignoring the testosterone filled members of this forum the general population adopt surround via one of the many generic “receivers” now available for between say $400 - $4000. These “receivers” are jam packed with LOGO’’s of all descriptions and most of which the general public have no idea what they are all about. When it comes to selecting a “receiver” most people assume the one with the most LOGO’s is preferable and then you look for the biggest lie of Wattage.
Have you noticed how similar they are all now in terms of form and function? You know, central digital display, mode knob on the left, volume on the right and a bunch of difficult to understand buttons with non descript nomenclature sometime hidden under a panel.
Now can anyone really state that these units are in anyway a real advancement in surround? I just saw the latest DENON ‘receiver” – guess what- its got Atmos!! Whoop de bloody do.
One thing that you will note is that the major consumer electronics manufacturers are absolutely killing themselves competing on basically price and LOGO’s for these beasts. I opened up a Pioneer “receiver” (about 3 years old) costing $600 and WOW!!! Talk about being absolutely full of electronics to accommodate more LOGO’s. I was stunned at how good their production engineering was to produce this unit (if it sells for $600 it costed $200 at most top make). I do not think in low / mid volume we could buy the parts for $1000. It is a credit to their purchasing power and dare I say it cheap labour rates in poverty stricken countries that they can actually still derive a profit with that degree of complication. Not saying Pioneer are bad or villains in any sense as Sony, Denon and the rest of them are the same and are all trying to deliver the maximum amount of technology at a price.
Still no manufacturer has stood away from the pack and asked the question – is their a better way to make it simpler and better?
PUBLIC CONFUSION AND DISSATISFACTION
Aside from the fact that people are told what to buy (fear of being different) we have a situation that most people really do not know how to operate their “receivers” with their multi levelled digital menu driven systems. Most people older than 50 understand knobs not menu’s!
And history repeats we currently have a multitude of incompatible digital formats that are not DOWNWARDS COMPATIBLE to the most fundamental and still most used format STEREO. I have said it many times – the most used format is stereo, just look around……AM/ FM radio, TV, Foxtel, Internet TV, IPod, MP3, YouTube, CD’s, records, cassettes. Yes we have DVD’s, Bluray’s but guess what they have the STEREO down mix track (That I use).
Overall there has been a return to stereo (remember what happened in the late 70’s). As mentioned in a Philips survey they found that in 60% of surround systems they sold the user either did not connect the rear (side) channels or just put them up front.
In addition vey few people choose to play their stereo recordings in 5.1 channel simulated surround as existing decoders basically make a mess of it.
SPEAKERS- BOXES, BOXES AND MORE BOXES
Has anyone ever noticed that TV’s have become thinner? Many are below 10 mm thick. In an attempt to match this flat profile surround manufacturers have come out with semi visually thin small coned speakers on thin rectangular posts (4 feet high). Again they all look like clones of each other. At the more HiFi end speakers still consist of typically a woofer/ midrange and a tweeter all mounted in a vertical line in a wooden box complete with a port and some sort of crossover. The biggest change in the more recent boxes is curves as everyone tried to mimic the look of the B+W “snail”.
I would argue that the speakers sold 30 – 40 years ago are just as good (or better) than the current batch. Really strikes me that again audio had been rather boring in recent years and things have just not kept up with the developments in Video screens.
Years ago Dave (Overture) and I decided to research the age old question of “why can a poor testing speaker sound good and a good testing speaker sound bad”? We ended up testing a multitude of speaker types and configurations and produced a 78 page test document. We tested and compared all the standard measures of speaker performance- frequency response, THD, IMD, impulse decay response, tone burst, polar response. When we attempted to correlate sonic preference to any parameter we completely failed!
We then sat down and examined the physical characteristics of two interesting cone speakers. One tested magnificently but sounded poor and another that tested poor but sounded great. We noticed two significant differences and constructed test jigs to mimic and switch in instantly these differences whilst trialling preferences on test audiences. Much to our surprise we found two things dominated all the other test parameters. They were:
1 Concentricity- absolute audience preference to a concentric driver configuration.
2 Dipole or bipole configuration or circular polar pattern.
When these 2 are combined the effects are immediate and obvious. Think about it for a moment in nature how often is sound split up into 3 frequency components. Light is like sound red, blue, green when viewed close together at a distance (Raleigh criterion) look like white but close up look like 3 separate colors. The brain spends more time processing and pulling together 3 separate frequency components.
Regarding the dipole or bipole preference- how many sounds emitted in a band only radiate frontally, how many sounds in nature?
Long story – shortened historically audio purists have always raved about the life like qualities of electrostatic speakers and have assumed this was so because of lower THD, flat frequency response, super fast impulse response. Well yes all true but we found the 2 above parameters dominated all other measurements. In fact you can make a cone speaker sound like an electrostatic by obeying the two above listed rules. Yes I am telling you guys some secrets as it is not patentable – all these tricks have been done before but I do not think well understood.
Why is this relevant to electrostatic speakers? Take a look at them they are natural concentric dipoles! Turns out that we had been manufacturing electrostatic speakers since the mid 1990’s and did not understand why they sounded better!
The only problem with electrostatics is that they are super directional, low sensitivity, poor bass, unreliable, hard to make, expensive, huge and unreliable. Apart from those small issues they sound great. We have been working on electrostatic speaker design since the mid 1990’s slowly trying to correct all the downsides whilst making them more cost effective. In some ways this work reached a peak in 2007 when we developed the Nakamichi Dragon Hybrid electrostatic speaker- pity Nakamichi had financial problems and our then stupid management could not come to a sensible arrangement – for those interested go to:
http://www.stereo.net.au/forums/ind...e-and-fortune-nakamichi-dragon-electrostatic/
We then continued work on the technology and managed to greatly reduce panel size whilst maintaining high output.
WHAT THE HELL HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH SURROUND SOUND?
Turns out it was one of the driving forces that lead me to investigate improved surround sound techniques. Some of the most “surround” experiences I had had was with just a stereo set of electrostatic speakers - often far better than what Dolby/ DTS could provide. In addition when I trialled the various incarnations of Dolby/ DTS over the years I was never impressed and always reverted back to stereo.
All I had to do was to design a better encode decode format/ system and solve the sweet spot/ center channel issue- easy I thought. I was wrong. Turns out Involve encode/ decode took 2 years of investigation and 2 years of hardware/ software development. As for eliminating the center channel and getting rid of the sweet spot- that was a funny process in that I spent 2 years thinking about how to do it and had no idea. Then one day between a peddle bike crash (I have had 23 broken bones bike riding- you would think I would quit) and a phone call from a stupid lawyer the idea hit me in a clear flash.
I figured out that I could use the directional characteristic of the electrostatic speaker (make it even more beamy) and with the use of some additional electronics create a grid of time arrival equalisation zones in a room. The effect of this is that in the majority of the room the time arrival of sound from the left and right speakers are unified – resulting in a central image in all positions of the room- no sweet spot. I can talk a bit about it as it is fully patented.
Only problem is that it required two amplifiers per speaker and looked pig ugly.
To solve the pig ugly problem I engaged Swinburne university in Melbourne Australia and a team of around 8 students to come up with concepts. At the end of the year they really succeeded and we stole there group leader Chris Coller. This then has formed the basis of our new “Y” speaker surround sound system.
A CUNNING PLAN
We are a small audio technology company located in the arse end of the world attempting to take on the major audio companies. Sounds an impossible task but I believe we have some advantages.
Frankly the audio/ surround world has been very boring for say 35 years with the last really significant change being the advent of the CD. Aside from that it really has been more bells and whistles and the Dolby lead surround sound side show. Even though the receiver surround systems are getting ever more complexed and elaborate I do not think we are hearing much improvement.
I have great confidence in the superiority of Involve encode/ decode and in particular given Involve encodes is indistinguishable from plain old stereo we have the potential of becoming an enhanced (hidden surround) stereo format. We can then offer full (as good in my opinion to discrete) surround that can be transmitted in all stereo media as the decode is not audio quality dependant. Meaning it works just as well on IPod/ radio/ YouTube as for a CD.
The general public really does not understand surround sound and rather than go for more and more elaborate menu systems we have gone for simple knobs and choosing to always connect to the stereo or stereo down mix output of your DVD or source. Basically we are set and forget so that any cretin (even me) can instinctively operate the system as easily as an older style stereo.
More than anything else- forget performance as Joe Public has no knowledge it is LOOKS and small size that will force a change. We have found that women and wives in particular are in fact attracted to the looks of our system!!!!!!! Men do not decide what to buy it is the wives in reality.
Our speaker panels are 5 mm thick and semi transparent creating a conversational piece – a bit like the $500 Dyson fans competing against $30 conventional bladed fans. In addition, we are REALLY LOUD creating some shock value. Yes I can babble on about sonic quality and superior technical performance but it is LOOKS that will separate us from the “me to” pack.
So whilst I am personally an absolute neurotic audio purist, I am ignoring all that in our forthcoming marketing campaign and the message will be more to factors the public can understand – simplicity, quality and LOOKS!!!
I am telling you guys some “secrets” as the QQ forum has been great for us and we really appreciate all the comments and help. In addition all super villains like to pre describe their evil intentions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ882QYzr-M