Mono > Stereo > Immersive

[The Computer Audiophile]

Doing some research on the introduction of stereo, I ran across some gems. Among them:

 

”A key challenge for selling stereo was consumers’ satisfaction with the mono music systems they already owned. After all, adopting stereo meant you needed to buy a new record player, speakers and a stereo amplifier.”

 

https://theconversation.com/amp/how-stereo-was-first-sold-to-a-skeptical-public-103668
 

 

There are so many parallels with the introduction of stereo and the introduction of immersive audio. The linked article above touches on many of them. 

[Marco Klobas]

Interesting. The history repeats itself.

 

After all, to be picky, stereo audio is anything that uses more than one channel.

 

Stereo derives from Greek στερεός which means firm, geometrically solid – something featuring a three dimensional nature (X Y Z).

 

We're used to define stereo precisely as a 2 channels representation. To some extent, the quadrophony, Dolby Atmos or any other multichannel audio representation is a variant of stereo (although some of them are object-oriented).

 

I get, though, that in regular conversations for the sake of simplicity it's handy to define stereo as a 2 channels audio only.

 

Just like a chronometer is a watch, clock or any other tool that measures time, yet everybody thinks of it as a stopwatch (which is technically a chronograph).

 

OK, I stop here – I only wanted to point out that immersive audio it's an evolution of the 3-dimensional audible perspective... 🙂