Consultation - SN3D?

Posted: 3 August 2016

Our TOA plugins currently use the "FuMa" B-Format convention but we are wondering if we should change them to use SN3D at some point in the future.

Technically, the convention used makes very little difference in processing, and converting between conventions is essentially lossless (we provide plugins that do this). However, different conventions can be confusing and making mistakes can scramble your mix! SN3D has been around for a while (it was invented by Jérôme Daniel, one of HOA's great innovators) but has become more important recently, particularly through its use in YouTube and related tools. Changing our plugins to use SN3D would make it harder to make mistakes when working with these tools; however, it would then be necessary to convert material coming from existing FuMa projects or classic B-Format microphones.

For those that are wondering about channel ordering conventions, we're assuming ACN here. (Does anyone actually use anything else?) And if we did this, new versions of our plugins would be given new labels so they could be used together with the old ones during migration.

We've heard some opinions, but at the moment we are undecided on what we should do here and would love to hear from more of our users. What would folk like us to do? Please feel encouraged to email us before the end of August 2016 to let us know!

UPDATE (October) Folk have been asking what the results of this consultation were. In summary, the vast majority of opinions one way or the other were in favour of switching to SN3D. There were some strong opinions the other way, but not many (sorry). Quite a few people didn't really mind as long as we are careful with the migration, which hopefully we have covered. So that's the plan! More soon.