List of Ambisonic hardware

Presence in this list does not indicate that the manufacturer uses the term Ambisonics for marketing or even endorses the concept at all, merely that the product produces B-format or something closely related.

Ambisonic panpots, with differing degrees of sophistication, provide the fundamental additional studio tool required to create an Ambisonic mix, by making it possible to localise individual, conventionally recorded multi-track or multi-mic sources around a 360° stage analogous to the way conventional stereo panpots localise sounds across a front stage.

However, unlike stereo panpots, which traditionally vary only the level between two channels, Ambisonic panning provides additional cues which eliminate conventional localisation accuracy problems.

A significant number of releases were made with this equipment, all in 2-channel UHJ, including several albums on the KPM production music library label, and commercial releases such as Steve Hackett's Till We Have Faces, The Alan Parsons Project's Stereotomy, Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio, Frank Perry's Zodiac, a series of albums on the Collins Classics label, and others, most of which are available on CD.

Unfortunately the albums, film soundtracks and other projects he created in UHJ over this period are largely undocumented at present, and thus remain unlisted in the Discography.

However, the remastering – and in some cases release – of original 2-channel UHJ recordings in G-Format has proved to be surprisingly effective, yielding results at least as good as the original studio playbacks, thanks primarily to the significantly higher quality of current decoding systems (such as file-based software decoders [4]) compared to those available when the recordings were made.

Other tools included "spreaders" which were designed to "de-localise" a signal (typically by varying the virtual source angle with frequency within a determined range) – for example, in the case of reverb returns – however these were not developed further.