Uh oh....


AT&T Labs Takes You There Live, Virtually


"AT&T Labs said Friday it has invented a new recording
technology that reproduces the sensation of being at live
events with uncanny accuracy. AT&T Labs sees the technology as a standard fornext-generation live event recording and playback,which can be streamed over broadband connections,
downloaded on the Internet, and recorded on DVD, the company said. The new recording technology captures the most perceptible parts of direct and reflected sound waves in a concert hall or other venue, AT&T (stock: T) said. At
its heart is a specially designed seven-microphone array
that captures parts of the sound field that are most
audible by the human ear and mixes them down to five
channels for delivery."
For the complete story, see
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010511S0011
jeffloistarca
This is the system that JJ from the Asylum has been working on. John Atkinson from Stereophile has heard their in-house demo and was pretty much blown away. He said that it was enough to make him reconsider his stance on multi-channel recordings. Sean
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Interesting. The AT&T folks had a listening room set up at the HiFi show here in NYC last weekend where, I assume, they were demonstrating exactly the new technology in question. I spent about five minutes in there, didn't manage to get a decent enough seat to really hear what it was doing for me, and then left for more flashy environs. It was essentially a five channel setup and they were running various tracks through a computer and using various different processors for comparison. Sounded ok from where I was, but not stunning enough for me to wait for a seat in the good spots. Now I'm wishing I had, but, at the same time, maybe it's just as well that I didn't...
Brillant! ATT takes on Sony! Godzilla v. Monthra! I'm going into my bomb shelter and listen to some cds.
Ok. We are now faced with SACD, DVD-A and now AT&T is leading us to believe there is even better multi-channel. Here is the question. Are we rapidly approaching the day where our digital audio players are out of date the minute we walk out the door of our local audio dealer with them? A situation similar to the modern computer market. Cheers, Doug