The New Wave

Since Alan Blumlein invented the concept of stereophonic sound in the 1930s, audio designers and engineers have been striving to create the perfect ‘immersive’ sound experience. Stereo provides a soundstage, but only in one dimension, laying out the instruments and singers in a line between the two speakers (give or take a little soundstage depth). Quadraphonic sound and later Dolby Surround and its successors took a step forward and created what was effectively a two-dimensional soundfield, with the sound sources localized both left to right and front to back. More recently ‘immersive’ surround formats like Dolby Atmos have been trying to add the third dimension of height (though only upwards from the listener, not yet downwards).

Keeping it sweet

But all these formats have suffered from one limitation — the ‘sweet spot’, the limited zone where