As Graeme demonstrates playback of his Vector Wave-Front scheme, the audience experiences the total lack of "sweet spot" limitations, moving freely about the room without losing accurate localization cues.
Graeme Huon provided us with an update and demonstration of his Vector Wave-Front scheme for more robust and realistic localization of reproduced sounds within a sonic space.
Graeme firstly provided a brief recap on the existing technologies and systems (5.1, 7.1, 22.2 etc) and their shortcomings - fixed forward perspective and limited "sweet spot".
He then outlined two new approaches - Huonlabs Vector Wave Front (VWF) and Fraunhofer Wave Field Synthesis (WFS), and described how reproducing audio wavefronts rather than point sources can both eliminate the sweet spot altogether and provide the missing height and distance information.
However he did suggest that the 100-200 speakers required by the Fraunhofer WFS system is likely to be a disincentive to its widespread adoption.
The Huonlabs VWF only requires 4 channels and 4 speakers, configured as two pairs of end-fire arrays.
Graeme mentioned that ultimately the two speakers of each array could be combined into a single cabinet for a total of two cabinets.
The second half of the presentation comprised a demonstration of the system using both live-recorded content, and post-encoded material using pre-recorded dry multitrack material.
This demonstration clearly showed the audience that even when moving around the room there was no loss of localization cues.
