NewsWorksSoftwareTextBioContact
background image

Blog archive for December 2016

SOUNDOME in Thomastown

December 15, 2016

2016-12-10_at_17-26-08

2016-12-10_at_15-53-23

2016-12-11_at_16-26-02

Last weekend I was invited by Anthony Hobbs to visit Thomastown in Ireland in order to check out the SOUNDOME. This is a geodesic dome with speakers fitted in the joints. The brainchild of Tom Watts, the current test implementation has 46 loudspeakers installed.

The geodesic dome structure is perfect for 3D ambisonic spatial audio. Currently the dome has triplets of speakers linked with the same audio signal, reducing the number of independent channels to 16. In future development it is planned to make all channels independent, in which case the dome should be able to support 5th order ambisonic.

Saturday was used as a showcase event, and Sunday it was all mine to explore. Having figured out channel and speaker configurations, and how to communicate with the sound card, I was able to play back a number of files and works, my own as well as works presented in recent MULTI concerts. Even though I did not get time to fine-tune the system, the results were convincing and promising. I see a great potential for the SOUNDOME as a portable outdoor attraction at festivals etc.

Reaper + Logic = No Love

December 30, 2016

Screen_shot_2016-12-30_at_12

This morning I’ve tried to see if it would be possible to use Loopback and aggregated AudioUnit devices to establish a 2-way surround sound connection between Reaper and Logic Pro. My hope was to be able to maintain track item content in Reaper, but pass some of the signals across to Logic for mutlichannel processing, and then back to Reaper again.

Specifically I’m interested in being able to use iZotope Neutron as a surround plugin with A-format ambisonic signals (Neutron supports surround formats in Logic but not in Reaper), and also to be able to do sound design by using mono and stereo plugin effects as parallell multi-mono effects in Logic (for me this is the single best feature of Logic, and one that I would like to see implemented in reaper as well).

Unfortunately, as confirmed in this thread, it is only possible to pass one 4-channel stream to Logic. Likewise Logic is unable to return more than one 4-channel stream back to Reaper.

What a bummer!