Stereo Tool

Another great day! Talked to lots of people. I have to revisit some of them tomorrow, and there are some that I'll definitely be in touch with after the NAB. Also briefly met with Bob Orban (so now I can finally say that I've met all the "big names" in FM processing).

Some interesting highlights:
- A 200" 3D tv with *200* different images - you see a 3D image of a car with the door open, and if you walk to the side you can look into it (I asked when we would have it in our living room, the answer: "Not in our lifetime")
- A company which encodes surround audio in a much smarter way (not 5 or 7 streams, but actual location info, which means you can play it back on any setup from 2 to 100 speakers, gaining accuracy as you add more speakers. And it can compensate for differences in speaker setups).
They also said they have something much more sophisticated than an AGC, which does not respond to indented volume differences such as gradual volume increases (now I really don't understand how they can do that and also get a constant maximum level out of it, unless they process a whole song at once, but this is one of the companies I need to get back to tomorrow).
- Heard the new Vorsis (now Wheatstone) processor - no more laser effects. Spoke with its designer who had some interesting things to say (I actually may have found a possible inprovement in my own clipper after talking to him). The dynamic range per band display seems really useful (you can immediately see how much dynamic range each band has).
- Also heard the Inovonics DAVID IV processor - I had never heard of them but it sounded very good (of course I have no idea how loud it was). Edit: Ow lol. Just looked through their brochure. The headphone output that I heard is taken BEFORE the clipper Latency is only 4.2 ms, which is really low.

Lol, the cab driver on the way to the convention gave me a card of a venture capitalist


BTW: Yesterday Leif and I saw a bug in the Omnia 9 RDS info that was decoded by the new Belar analyser. Could be an encoding problem in my RDS encoder, in the Belar analyser or (less likely) in the Omnia 9 code. I got in touch with the Belar developer and we'll analyse the issue after the NAB.

BTW2: Bojcha, I know what to do about that bass: Allow more distortion in the low freqs (while still masking things, so I need some smoothing filter in one of the calculations). Actually I have done that in the past but I have removed it 1 or 2 years ago when I simplified the clipper (it got better, but I might have to re-introduce it for bass indeed). Actually the recent quality cleanup by changing the window shape might have made this one slightly worse.

BTW3: O wow. At last year's NAB I thought of a method of increasing the bit depth of incoming audio (say from 16 bits to 18 or 19 bits). I never did anything with it due to a lack of time - but today I saw a company that tries to sell boxes that do just this and I was just now thinking about it again and.... It should be really simple to implement. (Much simpler than I thought before). I should be able to do it in less than one day I think. I'll give it a try when I get home. The only potentially bad thing is that if you feed it a hiss sound that's only 1 bit deep it will be turned into silence - which is probably fine because it could just be dithering noise. For Stereo Tool this is not very useful because the noise gate gets rid of this anyway (although you could use this and turn the noise gate off).

Note to self: Just had a very interesting chat with Bojcha who pointed me to a huge "bug" in the bass clipper: First I clip and get square wave bass, which is good. BUT THEN I LOWPASS FILTER IT. And the squarewave disappears.

Result:
- Less loud bass
- Intermodulationdistortion

Solution: Not using the lowpass filter. But that's not really possible because I have to combine some signals. Still thinking...

O well, this was fun

http://youtu.be/G7-UhoT_CY8

Attempt to achieve long as the bbp bass, and have come to something, but I can not make the impact as it is. In part I think is due to the MB and the other is the clipper now I see that is not achieved the desired effect.
It's good to have found this, I hope can be resolved soon.

_________________
by GAP
"Less is More" (Bob Katz)

Just came up with a possible AGC improvement that should fix the loud female voices volume drop. Should be very easy to implement, not completely shure though how well it will work.

Is the name of that company SRS?

Yes

Cool! Read an article about that new method of theirs a while ago so I figured it had to be SRS. The guy who wrote it was raving about the sound, said it was the best surround he ever heard in his entire life and that coming from only two speakers! So I'm obviously curious as hell to hear it, but it was almost a year ago and I haven't heard or read anything about it since. Glad to know it's not dead! So what did it sound like to you? Any good?

Did they gave away clues about how they will put it on the market and when?

Well, I have *very* little experience with surround sound so I cannot really compare it. The only thing I can tell that in their demo, they did have some very cool stuff.

For example, a remote control with which you could just move sounds around. They showed a sports match and you could just drag the presenter around, while the rest of the sound remained where it was.

Another interesting improvement is that - since all sounds are encoded separately - it's much easier to encode multiple languages (you only need to re-encode the speech).

But I see disadvantages as well: How is hardware going to keep up if you have an orchestra of 50 or even more instruments?

They also played a movie in 12.1, 5.1 and their own improved 5.1 audio. 12.1 contained also speakers at different heights
Their improved 5.1 sounded better than the "normal" 5.1 output. This has nothing to do with encoding but with their system to improve the sound if you have less speakers (basically, they find the 3 speakers closest to the source of the sound and spread the audio between those, adding more speakers creates a higher resolution). But their improved 5.1 sounded closer to the original 12.1 than the normal 5.1. Again, I have very little reference.

What you said about surround from 2 speakers: No, that's just normal stereo. It's just that they can easily downmix.

So, the NAB is almost over now. My feet hurt so bad that I could barely walk anymore... Anyway, I think I've spoken to just about everyone I wanted to speak to. Will go back tomorrow morning to talk to 3 or 4 people again, and then I'll be off to the airport.