more:Using Ambisonics with Ardour
There is significant interest in using ambisonics these days. Predating the "modern" surround systems known as "5.1", "7.2" etc, ambisonics is a technology for positioning sound in a 3 dimensional space. Instead of making assumptions about speaker positioning, the audio engineer simply defines where he wishes a particular audio signal to originate, and ambisonics encodes this into the signal (to produce a signal type called "B-Format"). The signal eventually arrives at a decoder that knows about the specific speaker configuration in use, and does some fairly heavy duty mathematics to process and distribute each signal so that it appears to be positioned correctly. This means that you can take an ambisonically encoded session and play it back on 4, 8, 12 or any number of speakers without re-panning it. Ambisonics is not perfect, and there are still no really good decoders to map B-Format to the 5.1 configurations so beloved of home theater owners. But it is a truly powerful system and ultimately much more useful than 5.1/7.2 etc. Ardour is uniquely positioned to allow you to to use it much more easily than most other DAWs.
http://ardour.org/node/2804