page_title: List of Ambisonic hardware
section_title: Legacy hardware
hierarchical_section_title: List of Ambisonic hardware / Legacy hardware
caption_attribution_description: English: This image depicts Ambisonic mixing equipment and is being provided to illustrate a subsection of the page on Ambisonics. I took this picture of the equipment in my studio and release it to the public domain. Richard E 17:00, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
context_page_description: This is a list of current or legacy Ambisonic hardware.
context_section_description: A popular and unfortunate misconception is that Ambisonic recordings can only be made with the SFM, and as a result there is a widespread, and erroneous, belief that Ambisonics can only be used to capture a live acoustic event (something that accounts for a tiny proportion of modern commercial recordings, the vast majority of which are built up in the studio and mixed from multitrack). This is not the case. In fact, Michael Gerzon's designs for Ambisonic panpots pre-date much of his work on soundfield microphone technology. Ambisonic panpots – which allow mono (for example) signals to be localised in B-Format space – were developed as early as the 1970s, and were incorporated into a special mixing console designed by Chris Daubney at the IBA (UK Independent Broadcasting Authority) and built by Alice Stancoil Ltd in the early 1980s for the IBA surround-sound test broadcasts.
  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.  This is especially pertinent to surround, where our ability to localise level-only panned sources is severely limited to the sides and rear.
  By the early 1980s, studio hardware existed for the creation of multitrack-sourced, Ambisonically mixed content, including the ability to incorporate SFM-derived sources (for example for room ambience) into a multichannel mix. This was thanks primarily to the efforts of Dr Geoffrey Barton (now of Trifield Productions) and the pro-audio manufacturers Audio & Design Recording, UK (now Audio & Design Reading Ltd). Barton designed a suite of outboard rack-mounted studio units that became known as the Ambisonic Mastering System. These units were patched into a conventional mixing console and allowed conventional multitrack recordings to be mixed Ambisonically. The system consisted of four units:
  Pan-Rotate Unit – This enabled eight mono signals to be panned in B-format, including 360° "angle" control and a "radius vector" control allowing the source to be brought in towards the centre, plus a control to rotate an external or internal B-format signal.
  B-Format Converter – This connected to four groups and an aux send and allowed existing console panpots to pan across a B-Format quadrant.
  UHJ Transcoder – This both encoded B-Format into 2-channel UHJ (see UHJ Format) and in addition allowed a stereo front stage and a stereo rear stage (both with adjustable widths) to be transcoded direct to 2-channel UHJ.
  Ambisonic Decoder – this accepted both horizontal (WXY) B-format and 2-channel UHJ and decoded it to four speaker feeds with configurable array geometry.
  It is understood that versions of these units were subsequently made available in the late 1990s by Cepiar Ltd along with some other Ambisonics hardware. It is not known if they are still currently available.
  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. See The Ambisonic Discography in the  List of Ambisonic Productions for more information. Engineer John Timperley employed a transcoder on virtually all his mixes over the course of over a dozen years until his death in 2006. 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.
  The lack 
caption: Audio & Design's Ambisonic Mastering System. From top to bottom, the B-Format Converter, the UHJ Transcoder, the Ambisonic Decoder, and the Pan-Rotate unit.
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