These Guys from Berlin brought their surround equipment to Sonar to show what is possible in fields of natural omnisonic sound perception. Their Wavefield Sybthesis system is a direct competition to Ambisonics. It's much better in terms of planar percetion, but suffers from relatyvely poor height broadcast. Unfortunately the hardware is crazy complicated and needs special recording scheme to work correctly. It is possible to upsample other surround systems to WFS although it doesn't bring any additional space feel to the sound - just widens the sweetspot. The best results may be perceived either on specially recorded tracks (as heared in the video - that's church organ concert) or algorythm processed synthetic (electronic) music.The overall score: too complicated for the effect it brings, but quite interesting as a proof of concept. Other known installations: Tresor Berlin
