It's quite amusing to see Meridian being berated for not pandering to the latest "more numbers are better" marketing game.
They are the only makers of domestic kit that I know of who make some sort of acknowledgement of the work of Michael Gerzon et al who proved that you only need 3 channels to transmit 360 degree localisation information and 4 channels to transmit full spherical localisation information.
5.1 is bad enough in the inefficiency stakes but 7.1 is laughable.
Hang on a sec. I think Michael said that you can *encode* a 360-degree planar soundfield in three channels (i.e. three channel UHJ). You still need at least four speakers to reproduce it. And then as you say you can encode a spherical soundfield in 4 channels, typically either UHJ or B-Format.
Two channel UHJ as used famously by Nimbus (and decoded in most M processors) is the same as the bottom two channels of the 3 and 4 track UHJ encodes: the 3rd channel makes the planar localisation precise, and the 4th channel makes the height localisation precise - so it is a modular and downwards compatible system system. (IIRC - it's been a while.)
It was a very elegant system. Playing acoustic soundfields using 5.1 is a bit of a cludge. What a shame...
(I'm just back from a Sokolov recital, if that means anything to anyone...)
Google Search
|
Meridian Systems
|
Meridian Streaming
|
Restaurant
|
WiKi
|
Duncan's Meridian Info
|
Board Rules
|
Restaurant Rules
