Quality multichannel ambience plugins?

B

Bigus Dickus

New member
Do these exist?

I've been doing a lot of research lately on acoustic theory, focusing primarily on the playback aspect. i.e., how you use stereo playback to recreate the sound of the recorded venue (real or simulated). I have inevitably been led to the conclusion that multichannel playback is fundamentally superior to stereo playback in several ways.

Which, naturally, got me to thinking about how recording and/or mixing would change to take advantage of that. I suppose multichannel micing of a live event would be the most obvious (and probably most accurate) way of capturing the ambient information needed to properly reconstruct the venue. I am curious about close mic studio tracking though.

Currently, I think most ambience processors (whether outboard rack or software based, digital or analog) mix the created ambience track back into the L/R channels. Are there any (probably software based, which is what I would be more interested in) that use a vector approach and properly route ambience information in a multichannel configuration to create realistic directional and spatial cues about the simulated environment?

Since it's just a matter of processing, I would think such an animal exists. If so, I'd love to try one out. Any suggestions?
 
OK, that looks pretty sweet, but I think I'll pass until this winning lottery ticket pans out. :)

Are there any DX plugins that can do anything remotely similar (without the space sampling obviously, but just using a predefined library) that I could play around with to become more familiar with the technique?
 
How are you going to mix and master this multi channel project? Surround mastering is still pretty expensive and beyond most home studios. There are some ways of doing it. I would assume that if you have a program that does surround then you already have some generic plugs to handle the processing?

If you really want to get into acoustic modelling then check out Acoustic Mirror. It uses impulses recorded in real environments and then you can use those for your effects. I'm not sure if it handles surround or not but I doubt it. Multi channel processing is so new and expensive that I don't think you'll find a $100 plugin. There's a reason the hardware boxes cost $10k.
 
Here is what I use for surround plugins:
The 360 surround bundle from Waves, which includes a pretty good reverb unit in the 360 reverb.
Dolby Surround Tools – which is a “must-have” for surround encoding.
Surroundscope - another must have, a visual display of your use of the surround domain.
Wider - another very good means of generating surround reverb chains.
In addition to the above there is some pretty expensive hardware involved.
After that I have to take it to a friends place for 'the final touches' which I do on an 8 channel Sadie DSD platform, which is next on my 'gottaget' list, but at $18000 plus it will have to wait a bit.
 
Thanks for the comments. I can monitor just fine in surround, but really wasn't aware of what was available for the software side. I figured it was still all pretty new.
 
Yeah, I periodically drool over Waves' Surround bundle.

But I'll definitely have to wait until it goes native... and then of course there's that minor extra expense of building a 5.1 system!

Thomas

http://barefootsound.com
 
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