If you have not spent much of time obsessing about sound as you have in the pursuit of the best HD or not picture in the last few years, you are forgiven. For whatever reason, the technology we’ve in contact with reached the level of “good enough” some years ago, and that’s where we have stopped. Case in point: performances. The concept of surround sound and multiple-channel audio has been…well…surrounding us since the 1940’s, with Disney Fantasia. And, how, we have the technology, so here we are. And this is the story with rock concerts too. We have been close and personal with the sound setups at our share of performances, and for all their sophistication, they really just boil down to “put speaker in room, and turn up the volume”. But a few years ago – somewhere near Mark Knoppler’s performance in Mumbai – in a casual conversion, somewhere brought this crazy idea: instead of using ten big speakers and hoping that they are loud enough to cover the entire auditorium, why not just use a hundred smaller speakers all around the auditorium? This way, you don’t walk the neighbors and you give everyone – even the cheapskates in the back – a better overall experience. Win – win. It’s highly possible that this someone threw the idea at the Fraunhofer Institute, because at CeBIT 2007, we saw it in action. IOSONO In its physical form, Fraunhofer’s ISONO technology is exactly what we just described: a continuous band of smaller speakers running along all four walls. The result’s however is the most immersive experience we’ve ever had, including the entire expensive tech we have been around in these offices. Also- and than one would think – we could walk up to the speakers and have our ears blown off. If you have ever walked up near the speakers at a club or concert, you will appreciate this. ISONO’s secret is the big sweet spot-of-the-hall sweet spot on this sweet spot business. But first… The Wave front - We hear sound because of the disturbances it creates in the air around our ears. If you think about it in slow motion, you can picture the sound leaving a speaker in expanding spheres. These spheres are called wave fronts, and when you are in their way, you hear sound. And some gets less intense with distance from speaker- too close and your eye ball may burst, too far and, well, why bother? We are building up to a point here………. The sweet spot - Picture yourself in say a movie theatre, the speaker like your households 5. 1 system, (if you in such a household) are placed on four corners of the room, and right in front with the screen. Each of these speakers is sending out sound in wave fronts for these entire speakers meet, you get to experience all the goodness of 5.1- channel audio – you are in a “sweet spot”. Unfortunately, most people watch their movies and concerts from outside the sweet spot. You may be one of the ten people getting the full experience. There’s a bit of advice you did not headed to the movies, pick seat in the centre of the theatre. Obviously, if more of us are to enjoy our things, we must all be in the sweet spot. One option would have been to place speakers really far from the audience space. In an alternate space, may be they do have enough real estate to do that. In our world, we must find another way. It’s called wave field’s synthesis. The simulation - Imagine this: you are about ten feet away from a large speaker, looking (hypothetically) at a wave front. This may be the optional non-eyeball-melting-but-still-loud-enough distance, but what if you don’t have ten feet to spare? What if you live in a high-rent dingy studio in the wrong of the wrong metropolis, curing your sad, pathetic ….sorry, sometimes we get carried away? Anyway, when you are pressed for space, like say a new multiplex in a crowded metro, it is possible to use an array of smaller speakers and mathematical algorithms or two to simulate that same wave front, just inches away from you. Creating a simulated wave front is simple enough. The speaker in the centre starts emitting sound first, the one on either side next, and so on. And there you are – if the speakers simulate the wave fronts at the sweet spot, suddenly the sweet spot becomes every spot that’s at least six inches away from the wall. And the big selling point here is that this works even with regular 5.1 audio as well, so it even makes business sense right here we are then. Interlude - We don’t really do this, but permit us, if you will get on our soapbox and yell for a bit. You see as the beginning of the article plainly suggests, the “future” of technology already exists. With loss less formats like FLAC, and gigabytes of space available for peanuts, it entirely possible for us to enjoy this because of good old human idiocy. Here’s how e got idea for a “future of sound” article: we have gone from CRT monitors to 22-inch HD capable screens in almost no time. We have gone from lugging around CDs and a portable CD player in a backpack, to dumping entire music collections on to a PMP and still have place left over. Our experiences with audio, on the other hand, have changed in decades, weather today or in 1979, there’s one way to bring a “concert experience” home – get the music in its purest form (no, not by kidnapping the band) put it through the best equipment money can buy (ideally the kind that the studios own) and turn up the volume. With ISONO, our concert experience may come closer to the experience of being in the studio with the artist. And if you can set up an ISONO system at home, you can bring the experience home as well. But the real problem – the rotten banana skin slip on- is what’s known as the “loudness war”. At some point in the jukebox era, recording industry executives decided that consumers were such brain-dead twits that they could not be asked to get up and turn up the volume when the noise in the car/cafe/establishment-of-your choice was drowning out of the song. And so decided to make “hot” masters recorded audio whose volume is artificially boosted to make them stand out more when they are played. This came to be regarded as a really good idea, so they kept doing it. We have labored under the impression that the audio on CDs is as good as it gets, but in reality, they are shining examples of artificially loud music – the boosted track required less digital space, and so it made sense to use this technique to cram in as many songs as possible. The worst part is that even through the audio CD, for all practical purposes, is dead, this practice continues. So, even though you can get yourself the best equipment, the best equipment the old garbage-in-garbage-out rule applies, and all that money would be spent for naught. But does this matter? When we take in to account economics, the demands of consumers, and other such factors that have nothing to do with technology, we come to one key phrase… Good enough - If you, like so many of us, like your music in your pocket while you travel, do you really think – even with sound cancelling headphone – that you are ever cared that the music is artificially “enhanced “? A sound gasm may be highly desirable, but its lack isn’t really going to tear the world in two. If you can get joy out of sound without caring that bitrates it’s reaching you at, then you probably aren’t even bothered about what this article is saying. If we demand great technology, it may or may not come. At least there will always be great music.  

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