What is Ambisonics and How Do You Use It? 

It's three days away!

@@AlteraSound excited

@@AlteraSound Did this happen? Would love to see this!

There's no such thing as an Ambisonic mic really, even though people do call them Ambisonics mics, it's really not correct. Ambisonics mics are just normal mics orientated in a way that makes encoding to Ambisonics more straightforward, but they still suffer the loss inherent in Ambisoncis encoding as the encoding process does consume some audio to convert to speherical domain so suffers Dynamic Range and Frequency Range loss once decoded back to the speakers representing each mic. This is lossy and why some spatial audio engineers would not consider Ambisonics to record live or field recording.

@@SamHocking okay, but still, you do choose such a mic and sunsequently use the multiple files you get from that for a mix? why? do you use them encoded - decoded or raw? thank you so much for your answers! :)

@@thenakedandfamousS For live/field recording with mics I would keep the recording and mixing process entirely within a PCM workflow, so Spatial PCM / channel or object-based mixing. I really don't see any benefits encoding the channel-based PCM signal recorded by an 'ambisonics' mic to actual Ambisonics and losing so much of the recording fidelity to the spherical harmonics conversion, when ultimately for playback it all must return to a PCM channel again to hear it, so just record in the array that matched the playback. If it were me I would use something like ORTF3D and SPS 8 workflows. Less is always more and everything captured in a mic should always null when passed through the workflow untouched. In Ambisonics that's just not possible so imo not best practice. e.g. you would never accept a process in mono or stereo recoding that couldn't null with what is recorded so why accept it in spatial audio?

@@thenakedandfamousS Yes, keep the signal in it's original recoded spatial PCM state rather than convert it to spherical harmonics and back to PCM for speaker/headphone playback again which is lossy. I just think the SPS 8 / Cube mic setups like ORTF 3D, Audio Technica BP3600 sound better than anything possible in ambisonics and no encoding required. Th 8 mic cube is also much closer to the listening reality of stereo, binaural and surround/atmos too. Apart from a couple of niche/academic possibilities in Ambisonics domain, everything can be done in simple Spatial PCM recording / Mach 1 in my messing around. I always struggle to see exactly what i'm gaining departing the recorded signal which is already encoded with the spatial and binaural context without touching it.

For me good pace. Could always get deeper, but not in 9 min.