New - POA Decoding Plugins

Posted: 19 February 2014

We've released a set of first order Plain Old Ambisonic (POA) decoding plugins, though we'd normally recommend you work with the TOA equivalents instead as TOA mixes are generally much sharper than POA ones.

The POA library is provided for those who are sure they want to work with the plain old first order format, for instance because of legacy material or because of first order recordings that are not to be converted to third order. Normally, POA is significantly less sharp than modern TOA.

If you wish to decode both first and third order material, for instance because of a combination of recordings and panned material, you can use the POA and TOA Decoding libraries in parallel. The POA and TOA decoders are carefully matched to give consistent results. However, it is often better to convert POA material to TOA. Methods for converting POA to TOA include the first order injector from the TOA Upmixers plugin library or just mixing the POA stream into the TOA directly.

You might also be interested in our flagship product, Rapture3D "Advanced", which lets you set up large irregular custom layouts. The VST plugin provided can be set to decode POA as well as TOA.