Another great day! Talked to lots of people. I have to revisit some of them tomorrow, and there are some that I'll definitely be in touch with after the NAB. Also briefly met with Bob Orban (so now I can finally say that I've met all the "big names" in FM processing).
Some interesting highlights:
- A 200" 3D tv with *200* different images - you see a 3D image of a car with the door open, and if you walk to the side you can look into it (I asked when we would have it in our living room, the answer: "Not in our lifetime")
- A company which encodes surround audio in a much smarter way (not 5 or 7 streams, but actual location info, which means you can play it back on any setup from 2 to 100 speakers, gaining accuracy as you add more speakers. And it can compensate for differences in speaker setups).
They also said they have something much more sophisticated than an AGC, which does not respond to indented volume differences such as gradual volume increases (now I really don't understand how they can do that and also get a constant maximum level out of it, unless they process a whole song at once, but this is one of the companies I need to get back to tomorrow).
- Heard the new Vorsis (now Wheatstone) processor - no more laser effects. Spoke with its designer who had some interesting things to say (I actually may have found a possible inprovement in my own clipper after talking to him). The dynamic range per band display seems really useful (you can immediately see how much dynamic range each band has).
- Also heard the Inovonics DAVID IV processor - I had never heard of them but it sounded very good (of course I have no idea how loud it was). Edit: Ow lol. Just looked through their brochure. The headphone output that I heard is taken BEFORE the clipper
Latency is only 4.2 ms, which is really low.Lol, the cab driver on the way to the convention gave me a card of a venture capitalist
BTW: Yesterday Leif and I saw a bug in the Omnia 9 RDS info that was decoded by the new Belar analyser. Could be an encoding problem in my RDS encoder, in the Belar analyser or (less likely) in the Omnia 9 code. I got in touch with the Belar developer and we'll analyse the issue after the NAB.
BTW2: Bojcha, I know what to do about that bass: Allow more distortion in the low freqs (while still masking things, so I need some smoothing filter in one of the calculations). Actually I have done that in the past but I have removed it 1 or 2 years ago when I simplified the clipper (it got better, but I might have to re-introduce it for bass indeed). Actually the recent quality cleanup by changing the window shape might have made this one slightly worse.
BTW3: O wow. At last year's NAB I thought of a method of increasing the bit depth of incoming audio (say from 16 bits to 18 or 19 bits). I never did anything with it due to a lack of time - but today I saw a company that tries to sell boxes that do just this and I was just now thinking about it again and.... It should be really simple to implement. (Much simpler than I thought before). I should be able to do it in less than one day I think. I'll give it a try when I get home. The only potentially bad thing is that if you feed it a hiss sound that's only 1 bit deep it will be turned into silence - which is probably fine because it could just be dithering noise. For Stereo Tool this is not very useful because the noise gate gets rid of this anyway (although you could use this and turn the noise gate off).
