Ambiophonic Audio Player

Download the JAVA-Application (version 0.7 - 17/01/2010) AmbiophonicAudioPlayer.zip (~14kByte) which works for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you don't have the JRE (JAVA Runtime Environment) installed then you'll get it here: http://www.java.com/download/manual.jsp

The Principles of Ambiophonics*:
1.) Ambiophonics uses RACE* (Recursive Ambiophonic Crosstalk Elimination) to enable binaural listening
2.) The Speakers are positioned with a separation angle smaller than 20° (called Ambiodipol) instead of 60° used in stereo. No worries, in contrast to stereo, the sound stage goes far beyond the boundaries set by the speakers (up to 120°).

Reference:
- RACE is a free algorithm made available by the Ambiophonics Institute (http://www.ambiophonics.org)
- Ambiophonics has been invented by the Ambiophonics Institute

Key advantages in comparison to stereo by playing the same material from CD, LPs or your computer:
1.) Elimination of Comb filtering effects and pinna direction finding errors
2.) By having the speakers close together reflections by walls and the bass mode response of the room are much easier to control
3.) The center presence is very stable and therefore always easy to locate

Listening Experience:
The sound stage gets a strong deepness, height and wideness which creates a real three dimensional listening experience.
Locating a single sound source within the original stereo image is much easier with Ambiophonics. You're able to pinpoint each instrument in all three dimensions!
To achieve optimal cross talk cancellation Ambiophonics has a sweet spot (similar to stereo) along the median line where the sound stage has its best representation.

Which records sound best?
In contrast to the standard stereo setup where spatially rich recordings that contain binaural cues with inter-aural time differences (ITD) loose their deepness, Ambiophonic plays back a much richer sound stage.
Many productions mix monaural microphones or direct sources between channels to create phantom images limited to inter-aural level differences (ILD), but even those recordings do get a wider and more precise sound stage with Ambiophonics.

The Ambiophonic Audio Player (AAP)

What does the program do?
In comparison to the Ambiophonic Transcoder which takes audio samples from the computers sound card inputs to apply the Recursive Ambiophonic Crosstalk Elimination (RACE), the Ambiophonic Audio Player opens WAV audio files for playback.


Installation:
Because AAP is a Java application it will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. There is no need for any installation, just launch the JAR-File.
As a pre-condition you need to have the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed which you can download here: http://java.com/download/manual.jsp

Setting up your listening environment:
1.) Place your speakers in a separation angle of around 20°. The speakers do need a good phase response, but even simple single driver PC-Speaker work well.
2.) Launch AAP without changing the attenuation and delay
3.) Open for example intrumental music or the below mentioned test WAV-Files to do the system setup
4.) Move along the median of the speakers until you find the best sound stage experience

To ease the setup of the Ambiophonic environment download the white noise 15 seconds audiofiles left.wav and right.wav, load them into AAP and start playing. Now change your setup until the left.wav plays beyond the left speaker and the right.wav beyond the right speaker. Please keep in mind that the sound stage wideness (>90°) is not limited to the speakers angular separation (<20°).

AAP GUI Elements:

Attenuation:
Increasing the attenuation value reduces the cross talk elimination which results in a smaller sound stage.

Center:
A higher center value reduces the crosstalk elimination of "equiphase/similar amplitude" signals to emphasize center sounds like vocals.

Delay:
Experiments show that the delay value of 68μs should be kept. To adjust the delay for the cross talk cancellation wavefront the speaker separation and the listening distance to them should be changed. Nevertheless, because of its discrete nature the delay value steps are limited to multiple of 22.7μs.

Frequency Limitation:
As default RACE works on a limited frequency range of 0Hz-4.5kHz by keeping all other frequencies untouched. Deselection of the checkbox activates Recursive Ambiophonic Crosstalk Elimination for all frequencies between 0Hz and 20kHz.

Bypass:
Selecting the checkbox activates transparent playback without applying RACE to allow comparison between Stereo and Ambiophonics.

Leveling:
The implementation of the RACE algorithm works with 64Bit values to keep the highest accuracy. Because of the 16Bit nature of audio samples there is a need for attenuation to correctly map the values which works through automatic leveling allowing the use of the full 16Bit dynamic range.
Any 16Bit clipping triggers the auto leveling to reduce the amplitude by 0.1dB. Even in automatic mode your're able to decrease the attenuation up to 0dB, but the automatic will try to bring it back as soon as it sees overflows.
Finally, you can switch of the auto mechanism to adjust leveling manually to keep the overflows in an acceptable range.