Ambisonic Links

This section includes links to other sources of Ambisonic information. If you have any relevant links you would like included, please let me know.

• The Ambisonic Toolkit (ATK) brings together a number of classic and novel tools for the artist working with Ambisonic surround sound.  The ATK toolset has been been gathered, authored and developed by Joseph Anderson over a number of years, and is now a collaborative open source (GPL) project.
• The Ambisonic Motherlode - an attempt to collect and index all the available material on Ambisonics - and you can help!
• WigWare Ambisonic Plug-ins and Ambisonic Tutorial Site from Dr Bruce Wiggins at the University of Derby
• Visit Stephen Thornton's impressive Michael Gerzon Photos site.
• Check out the Tetramic from Core Sound – the first soundfield-type microphone available for under $1000.
• There is now a series of Wikipedia pages on Ambisonics, to which several of us in the Ambisonic community have been contributing. Join in!
• Visit Etienne Deleflie's revamped Ambisonia site, where you can upload Ambisonic recordings and compositions to share and enjoy, find Ambisonic players- and much more. See the Tools page for more details.
• There have been recent revisions to the B-Format File Specification (Jan 2007)
• Sonic Architecture offers information on 2nd order Ambisonics implementations for composition by Jan Jacob Hofmann.
• Shenono is a series of objects and patches for PureData that specialise in the performance and production of surround sound using the ambisonic format.
• Here's the Sound Thief, a low-cost home-made Soundfield microphone from Australia
• We are very pleased to be hosting Dr. Philip Cotterell's PhD thesis on a Second Order Soundfield Microphone.
  • Download the entire thesis as a Zip file containing a set of PDFs or as individual PDF sections:
  • ReadMe file - please read this first
  • Front Matter
  • Chapters 1 & 2
  • Chapter 3
  • Chapter 4
  • Chapter 5
  • Chapter 6
  • Chapters 7 & 8
  • Appendices 1 & 2
  • Appendices 3 & 4 and References
• Keith Howard of Hi-Fi News is establishing an on-line archive of Michael Gerzon's magazine articles
• Michael Gerzon's Ambisonic Bibliography - 1995 (on Martin Leese's site)
• DIY Soundfield-style Microphone - a cool home-made Ambisonic microphone designed and built by Henry Walmsley
• An alternative DIY Ambisonic mic from Nick Mariette in Australia
• James Mooney's Ambisonic Pages
• David McGriffy's Ambisonic tools
  • Visual Virtual Microphone, A graphical utility to derive virtual microphone signals from b-format files.
  • Ambisonic Transcoder for ProTools
• Ambisonic VST Plugins from the University of York
• ...and more from York courtesy of Aristotel Digenis
• Additional Ambisonic VST Plugins from gerzonic.net
• Rolv-Karsten Roenningstad hosts a very useful Ambisonic Decoders Page with links to the Ambisonic Timeline and other projects.
• Jérôme Daniel's PhD Thesis on 3D audio and Ambisonics, "Acoustic field representation, application to the transmission and the reproduction of complex sound environments in a multimedia context" is now available with an English abstract (the rest is in French), along with supporting PowerPoint presentations and movies. Also see his Experimenter's Page!
• The Cantares SSP-1 is a decoder system (and subwoofer crossover) for Ambisonics, Home Theatre, Stereo Enhancement, and Surround. Read the AudioMedia review!
• Second-Order Ambisonics represents a new development on the Ambisonic scene. For more information see Richard Furse's 3-D Audio page. Software tools are also available.
• Martin Leese provides a primary North American resource on Ambisonics
• Dave Malham at the University of York, England, heads the Music Technology Group, which carries out active research into extending the scope of Ambisonics. His site represents the primary source in the UK for material on this topic.
• If you're into Ambisonics, subscribe to the Sursound mailing list -- a useful forum for serious surround-sound discussion. To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail message to majordomo@lists.uoregon.edu with the following command in the body of your email message:
  subscribe sursound yourname <youremail@host.domain>
  You'll receive a confirmatory message with instructions.
• Mark Anderson and Eero Aro maintain the incredible Ambisonic Discography - and there's now a publications list too, which includes some of my own articles I'd forgotten about.
• Also required reading: the latest... the most comprehensive... the Ambisonic FAQ from Martin Leese.
• Microsoft has a draft specification for computer-based multi-channel audio, which supports Ambisonic signals such as B-Format. It's entitled Enhanced Audio Formats For Multi-Channel Configurations And High Bit Resolution and is here by request. Feedback and issues to Noel Cross or Martin Puryear. - Revised March 17, 1999.
• The papers from Acoustic Renaissance in Audio (ARA) that formed the basis for the DVD-Audio specification are still available online. And MLP, the lossless compression system used in DVD-Audio includes hierarchical surround capabilities that can be used to carry B-Format and speaker feeds.
• Audio cognoscenti regard Meridian as one of Britain's leading consumer audio manufacturers. Their Surround Processors include Ambisonic decode capability, and have some incredible reviews.
• Kimmo Vennonen maintains a page of Ambisonic information in Australia including work by David Worrall and other useful documentation.
• Angelo Farina in Italy is doing some very interesting work in auralisation and acoustic simulation which includes Ambisonics.
• If you're interested in the Soundfield Microphone, check out this location.
• Audio Dimension offers PC-based software and hardware for Ambisonic control.
• Jeff Bamford at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, has carried out comparisons of Ambisonics, Dolby surround and stereo.
• Also from Canada, here's Daniel Courville's thesis on 3-D Sound (in French). He provides a detailed overview of Ambisonics in Chapter 5 and there is an extensive bibliography.