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Netflix, Ambeo, & spatial stereo
The first time we featured Sennheiser’s Ambeo in Sound+Image, it was in relation to nine-channel music recordings. Sennheiser’s then ‘tonmeister’ and sound engineer Gregor Zielinsky was pioneering music recordings in 9.1, and spent several years demoing and advocating this recording technique at expert meetings and (mainly pro) audio conventions, culminating with more open demonstrations at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, and elsewhere.
This variation of multichannel audio was designed more for use with music than movies, and required replay on a 9.1-channel loudspeaker system. Against obvious competition, it never seemed destined for greatness, and multichannel music has gone on to become dominated, like multichannel movie soundtrack streaming, by Dolby Atmos presentations in varying degrees of quality.
But that form of Ambeo in 9.1 did find an early application in event audio. It was used for a travelling David Bowie exhibition in 2015, and later for a Pink Floyd exhibition at London’s V+A, which included an Ambeo mix of Floyd’s famously awkward reunion for their performance at ‘Live 8’.
VR and 360 audio
But by the time Zielinsky was conducting his CES 2016 demonstrations, Sennheiser was already shifting emphasis to “a strategic focus on 3D immersive audio”, seeing the rise of virtual reality and 360 video as key markets for a wider definition of immersive audio. Sennheiser had an Ambeo 3D microphone, and in 2017 created an Ambeo Smart Headset which could make binaural recordings straight to an iPhone using earbuds with built-in microphones.
We were handed a pair of these by Dr Andreas Sennheiser himself at a Global Conference for Berlin’s IFA exhibition in 2017; the recordings they made were sensationally immersive, and when played back on decent headphones, preferably eyes closed, they transported you into the recordings. No use for taping, say, a band, as they don’t focus directly ahead,
