Binaural auudio is madness to listen to!
Some guy has come up with a system that is proper 3D audio. Not surround sound, much better.
I wish I had the link or the guys name at least.
Only he knows the technology at the moment.
G
Michael Gerzon?
He's the father of ambisonics. This started in the 60's at the BBC, so it's certainly not a recent thing. Kind of a spinoff of the research the BBC was doing with stereo. Due to the digital explosion, however, it has become practical lately. See:
Higher Order Ambisonics
On the input side, you need 4 channels and an ambisonic mic. The most known is the Soundfield. It used to come with a hardware converter. These days, the hardware converter has been replaced with VST plugins. And Rode and Sennheiser released ambi mics too, recently. Still not cheap, but we're getting there. There's even a recent Chinese mic for 350$. That's the cheapest one on the market. There's also the Zylia, from Poland. Equipped with a lot more than four mics.
It can be done with other mic setups too. But it would require a deeper understanding of the math involved. I'm not even thinking about that. Michael Gerzon used another setup, before Soundfield mics even existed.
Once you have the 4 channel recording (A format), you can derive stereo, binaural or any other format from it. You can also change directivity of the mic in post and other fancy stuff. In your DAW, you'll need B-format. It's really amazing what you can do with an ambisonic recording.
The problem lies on the playback side. If you want to process ambisonic audio in the studio, you need at the very least four identical speakers. And that's for 2D audio. For true 3D audio, you need at least eight identical speakers.
There are academic setups with hundreds of speakers. You'll find them in Canada, France, Finland, Italy, UK, Japan, New Zealand and a few other countries. There are also already a couple of companies specialising in ambisonic setups for events, in London and in France.
The end result from your studio will usually be binaural, because headphones are what everyone is using. Unless it's for movies, games or events. No living rooms with eight speakers around, unfortunately.
The game sector is also very interested and already experimenting with ambisonics, although their use is different. They need to map sound to a virtual 3D space. So they're usually recording in mono and mapping afterwards. Kind of the reverse idea. Same math, though.
Youtube already allows ambisonic sounds with 360° video. There are quite a few around. Facebook is also into it and has released an ambisonic toolkit. On the DAW side, you'll probably need to use Reaper, as the rest isn't even ready to catch up. Except maybe for Protools and Nuendo, but these are bloody expensive.
When it comes to playing back multi-channel audio through a browser, Chrome is what you need. Google has been developing an audio extension for years now and one of the things included, is ambisonic sound.
The first tool you would want to check out, is Ambisonic toolkit:
The Ambisonic Toolkit - Tools for soundfield-kernel composition
It's for Reaper, and free.
Another one is Daniel Courville's site:
Ambisonic Studio
Also nice, is IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique):
Accueil | IRCAM
Dave Malham's site has moved to:
Ambisonic.Net - where surround-sound comes to life
There are a lot of resources out there. But they're somewhat hard to google, unless you use "ambisonic" as search phrase. "Surround" will get you nowhere. That's just a studio produced artificial effect.
I think ambisonic recording is the future. It has already been used to record classical music commercially, although the output was still plain stereo. But it allows the mixing engineer to control the directivity of the mic in post. That in itself is a revolution. In popular music, like rock, it probably won't be as important, because there's no natural soundfield, because of DI's, reamping, synths and other electronic musical instruments. A jazz combo would work well. And of course, movie studio's are looking into it, because it can also produce 5.1 or even 10.2 surround for movie theatres.