It is undesirable for the listener to be conscious that the sound is coming from a discrete number of speakers.
Some simple decoding equations are known to give good results for common speaker arrangements.
Because human beings use different mechanisms to locate sound, Classic Ambisonic Decoders it is desirable to modify the speaker feeds at each frequency to present the best information using Shelf Filters.
Hardware decoders have been commercially available since the late 1970s; currently, Ambisonics is standard in surround products offered by Meridian Audio, Ltd.
There are five main types of decoder: This design is intended for a domestic, small room setting, and allows speakers to be arranged in diametrically opposed pairs.
These are so named because the paper introducing deriving Ambisonic Decoders for irregular loudspeaker layouts was presented at the 1992 AES conference held in Vienna.
The technology provides one approach to the decoding of Ambisonic signals to irregular loudspeaker arrays (such as ITU) commonly used for 5.1 surround sound replay.
Parametric decoding was pioneered by Lake DSP[9] in the late 1990s and independently suggested by Farina and Ugolotti in 1999.