It occurs to me to remark that although ambisonics is not likely ever to have any end-user visibility (it had a chance in about 1980, which was comprehensively blown** mainly by the UK government body that was supposedly providing support and marketing), it does have a significant presence behind the scenes. A number of audio processing
* use it internally, usually when rotation of a soundfield is required; and for this reason it is used in the innards of some
.
If Ambisonics is so wonderful, how come we aren't all using it? The answer is a sad tale of bad luck and politics. The original University-based inventors of Ambisonics were in no position financially to develop the idea commercially. Luckily, there was an organisation that was established to do exactly this: to help University inventions get out into the wide world of industry and commerce. The National Research Development Corporation had achieved some notable successes in this kind of activity, and the fledgling Ambisonics was presented to them. They were interested.
The NRDC approach consisted of obtaining and administering the patents associated with an invention, funding its development, and then finding a licensee for the invention. The inventors would then earn a royalty from the invention and the NRDC would recoup its investment. That was the theory, and it worked quite well in some areas. The NRDC approach would particularly suit you if you had, for example, developed a new way of making some kind of plastic. The idea could be licensed exclusively to a chemical manufacturer, and off you go. For some other types of invention, however, the NRDC approach was disastrous--as the inventor of the Hovercraft would testify.
In hindsight, some might propose that the NRDC was not the best organisation to handle Ambisonics. However, although a lot of things didn't happen, and a number of apparently ill-advised things did, it is difficult to see what other organisation would have got Ambisonics off the ground. The system may have languished for a decade or so, but it is quite possible that without the NRDC it wouldn't be here at all.
The problem was that while the NRDC was set up perfectly to license an invention to one exclusive licensee--ideal with that chemical process, for example--it was not in the slightest bit in a position to promote a system whose success rested on as many companies as possible becoming licensees. We can imagine that it would have failed equally with an invention like Compact Disc, DAT, Dolby B, or even the humble Compact Cassette. While the NRDC had the funding to go around selling ideas to individual companies, the idea of mass marketing an invention like Ambisonics --holding big press conferences, exhibiting at trade shows, making demonstration records, and generally selling one thing to a lot of people-- was out of the question. Ambisonics needed something more like product marketing and less like searching quietly for an exclusive licensee. It is even possible that the NRDC's brief simply didn't allow it to do the things that Ambisonics needed.
One by one, however, companies began to pick up on the system: record companies like Nimbus--the longest and most consistent licensee, with literally hundreds of CDs produced over the last 25 years, every one Ambisonically recorded with their equivalent of a Soundfield microphone; hi-fi manufacturers; and professional audio manufacturers like Calrec, who produced the first Soundfield microphone.
Ambisonics was originally designed to reproduce sonic actuality as accurately as possible--an approach exemplified by Nimbus Records, whose 'Natural Sound' is more an entire philosophy than simply a method of recording and playback: surround sound handled as accurately as possible is just one of the facets of the Nimbus approach. However, there were plenty of people who wanted to do decidedly unnatural things with the process, like mixing multitrack recordings Ambisonically.
The idea of Ambisonic panpots had been included in the original theoretical work by Michael Gerzon, but it wasn't until the early 1980s that practical pieces of studio equipment began to emerge--from Audio & Design Recording--which enabled conventional multitrack recordings to be mixed into an Ambisonic format. These units (now licensed to Cepiar) were--and still are--very cost-effective, and several major artists began to use them, but in the meantime, apart from Nimbus, very little was happening.
A chicken-and-egg situation developed during the Seventies and early Eighties in which hardware manufacturers looked at Ambisonics but put their projects on hold due to lack of software--they were looking for more than a series of classical CDs, however good they were. Boots Audio, for example, were poised to launch a complete Ambisonic microsystem-- but changed their minds. Meanwhile, many people on the record side were unwilling to make Ambisonic recordings because nobody could decode them.
This situation should never have arisen, and it could have been short-circuited by two things, had they been better known. The first was that Ambisonically-recorded albums sounded a lot better than regular stereo, even if you didn't have a decoder. For example, Digital Audio magazine in 1986 reviewed one of the first mainstream Ambisonically-mixed CDs-- Stereotomy, by Alan Parsons--with comments like, "Studio pop production doesn't get any better... a winner in the sound quality stakes. Sounds emerge from everywhere, clear and clean. The opening of track 3... completely fooled my dog into thinking a car had driven up the driveway. The only track in which Ambisonics was not used... [was at] lower volume, more distant." It was worth making Ambisonic records, even if nobody ever decoded them. And secondly, as manufacturers like Minim and Troy Ambisonic (a maker of in-car Ambisonic systems) quickly discovered, decoders could offer a 'super stereo' mode which would dramatically enhance existing stereo recordings played through the decoder, by extracting surround information and using it to create impressive localisation and 'wrap around' effects.
And the strategy of trying to persuade record companies to endorse Ambisonics and use it on all their albums--a similar approach to that used by the failed Quad systems--really put the companies off. Anything that smacks of double inventory is likely to do that. And besides, not only was there no need to ask record companies to commit to Ambisonics; you didn't need to ask them at all, any more than if you wanted to use a particular make of digital reverb on your album. The decision was made in the studio by the producer, not by someone at the record company. It was only very late in the day that direct approaches began to be made to producers and studio personnel, and then NRDC fell foul of the next problem -- the government that created it.
It's a known fact that Margaret Thatcher's government really didn't like the idea of the NRDC. Their view was that British inventions should stand or fall on their ability to attract industry backing on their own, and that a "quango" -- a quasi non-governmental organisation -- shouldn't do it for them. But rather than admit this, the course taken was to restrict the NRDC and prevent it doing its job properly, so as to demonstrate how such organisations were a Bad Thing--a technique which was also attempted with the British Health Service. The NRDC was bound together with the National Enterprise Board--who at the time used most of their budget to fund British Leyland--to form a fictitious entity called the 'British Technology Group'.
Not too long after this, despite highly competent NRDC people in charge of the Ambisonic project--as was the case all along, it is important to point out-- virtually everything that was being done, stopped being done. At the time, a member of staff privately suggested to me that one of the main problems was that nobody knew how much funding they'd have next month, so the idea of planning anything like a long-term marketing plan for Ambisonics was completely out of the question. The system became moribund, with a few exceptions: Nimbus Records; a few other enterprising record companies like Brendan Hearne's York Ambisonic; parts of the BBC quietly doing drama and concert recordings with Soundfield mics; EMI Music's KPM Production Music Library; and manufacturers like Calrec, Audio & Design, and Minim.
Eventually, the NRDC saw a way out of the situation, simply by doing what they were best at--namely locating a single, exclusive licensee and letting them take responsibility for 'doing something' with the mass of Ambisonic technology, which by now included nearly 400 patents. Very soon there were three contenders for the privilege: Nimbus Records, Avesco plc, and a Canadian group called Maple Technology. To the likes of you and me, Nimbus, with two decades' experience of the system, were number one contenders; and Avesco, a major British technology-based group with interests in high technology audio and video, were second. None of us knew anything about Maple, so it was a great surprise when they were awarded the licence. Then everything went quiet again--for months. Absolutely nothing happened and eventually the licence was terminated. Next, Avesco got it--and also proceeded to sit on the technology for months. They disposed of their Troy Ambisonic subsidiary (a condition of obtaining the licence, apparently!). After a long period of inactivity, they too lost the licence.
Finally, the exclusive licence to Ambisonics passed to Nimbus Records. One of the first activities of then Company Secretary Stuart Garman--an avid music enthusiast and long-term supporter of Ambisonics--was to present the system to major Japanese manufacturers looking for a way to offer new, serious surround sound capabilities in their products. This led to a number of short-lived products; but then Nimbus got into serious trouble as a result of the death of their financial backer, Robert Maxwell, and were unable to exert any more influence. Nimbus do, however, continue to record exclusively in ambisonic format to this day.
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