Noise Makers have announced the release of Ambi Head v1.3. It includes a new set of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) designed by the AMBEO team at Sennheiser, to reproduce the Neumann KU 100 head. This is a great addition to the Ambi Head plug-in, providing an even more useful tool to binauralise sounds recorded with the AMBEO VR Mic.
Ambi Head v1.3 also includes the latest HRTF designed by Google, to monitor your mix exactly as it will sound in YouTube 360.
Head rotations can be controlled by dragging mouse on the 3D head model, or directly from a mobile phone playing a 360 video with Google Jump Inspector which is an App for Android.
How Does This Help In Pro Tools
Binaural sound is coming back big time thanks to virtual reality as VR and binaural is a marriage made in heaven as it delivers immersive audio over two channels and is ideal fro earphone and headphone listening.
What Is Ambi Head?
Ambi Head is a plug-in for converting ambisonic signals into 3D binaural audio. It allows manipulations of 3D scenes (rotations and control of spatial width) and contains HRTF filters specifically designed for immersive listening and accurate reproduction of B-format signals.
As you can see in the video above, custom HRTF filters can be also loaded via the integrated SOFA importer, letting users choose “custom heads” for personalised binaural rendering.
An integrated Goniometer provides a visual display of the binaural output (Lissajous display) designed to give insights into the scene spatial properties.
An example session using Ambi Head and Ambi Pan is available from Noise Makers for Pro Tools HD, Reaper and Logic Pro X.
What is Ambisonics?
Ambisonics is a “scene-based” paradigm to capture, transform and render 3D audio. It is ideal for 360 videos and interactive media allowing listeners to rotate their head into the scene. If you never heard about it, a good introduction is available on Wikipedia.
In practice, first-order Ambisonics is a 3D extension of mid/side stereo with additional height and depth channels. The resulting 4-channel signal set is called B-format. Several microphones and plugins exist to record and process B-format. For example:
Ambi Head is designed to complement these tools. It offers binaural rendering of ambisonic scenes and the internal filters have been designed for immersive 3D listening.