Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone with a podcast that gets too popular too fast. One of my favourites, “Slashdot Review” blew the bandwidth allocation from its hosting provider and was summarily shut down. Andy is apparently in thre process of trying to get his old content back to move to a new server. I hope it works, but everyone should beware. Becoming popular has its price !
Read more at slashdotreview.com
It’s a bit of a conundrum, but many outdoor activites are exactly the kind of thing where you wouldn’t drag along a pile of magazines or a TV, and yet that’s how information about them is traditionally spread.
So along strolls “trailcast", an audio magazine about walking (well, “hiking"), which you can fit into a few grams of MP3 player. Neat idea, and just the thing for listening to as you stomp around the countryside. Well, maybe. My only slight concern is that the content seems actually aimed more at “armchair” hikers. It seems like the kind of stuff you’d listen during a tedious commute when you would really rather be out in the wilderness. For the actual walking, a good long audiobook might be a better choice :)
Read more at TrailCast - Podcasting on foot
An interesting article which compares synchronous and asynchronous internet usage to getting water. Do you “go to the well", or do you rely on the tap? Do you take your media home in a MP3-player bucket, or sit by a gushing stream?
Read more at: Feeling Kinda Asynchronous
Another really interesting way to try and make money from podcasting. Not selling podcasts, not even selling podcasting tools, but selling customization of podcasting tools.
If you want to stump up the cash you can go online and create a “customized” version of the iPodder “lemon” client preloaded with a selection of feeds and otherwise tailored to your requirements. In itself this would not seem worth much - after all, you can do that yourself once you have installed it. The trick is that the fee is just for creating the custom version. You can then make an installer for this new personal collection and reader available for download on your web site. That begins to feel like it might be worth paying for …
Read more at Podcasting News: iPodder Updated; New Version Lets You Create a Custom Podcast Client.
Over the last few days, this site has recieved a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. I still very much welcome genuine comments and trackbacks, but please be aware that you may not see your words or link immediately, as I am adding extra layers of protection.
Grr..
I just heard on Paul Figgiani’s excellent The Point Podcast (even though he forgot to put the link in the show notes) about a new bit of podcast creation software. The list of features seems impressive:
# Record segments of your show, whenever you want, in any order you want.
# Import music, sound effects, and spoken-word recordings.
# Rearrange and edit show content for professional results.
# Preview your show on your PC or your portable audio player.
# Publish your show to a website, with full RSS, XML and HTML support.
This seems especially nice, as it matches fairly well with my preferred “non-linear” editing approach, rather than the record-in-real-time route taken by the likes of MixCast Live
My main problem with this is the general lack of information on the web site. I can’t tell if it can do things like ID3 tag manipulation and volume normalization across a whole podcast in one hit, both of which are vital features for a non-linear audio editor such as this. It’s also described as not just Windows-only, but WindowsXP-only, which means that my relatively old Windows 2000 system is no use.
Read more at Propaganda Podcasting Software
I love that there’s a steady stream of fresh ideas in podcasting. It’s cool to get glimpses into people’s lives, but sometimes a bit more structure is appropriate.
So I was glad to be pointed to The Slam Idol Podcast. It’s a poetry podcast, but with a twist. Not just stuff from one poet, but from anyone who sends in a recording. These poetry tracks are then bundled into groups (the first group featured six, with delightfully diverse styles and content, for example), and site visitors are encouraged to vote on the pieces. I guess the audience-voting is why it gets the slightly-specious “idol” in the title.
I’ve missed the first “slam", but I’m seriously thinking about submitting some of my poetry for a later battle. So if you see my name on the site some time, feel free to vote. Nudge, nudge :-)
Read more, listen, and vote at The Slam Idol Podcast.
As you may know, I like listening to podcast audio novels. I think they are a great idea, and a fun thing to load up a player with for a long journey (or tedious meeting, or whatever). So I was interested to spot in the ipodder.org new podcasts announcement blog an announcement of the serialization of “Claybourne", described as “A sci-fi / supernatural thriller / soap opera podcast drama".
I popped the feed into the ipodder client, only to find that it only contains episodes 16-25.
If I may be so bold, that’s a plainly stupid idea. While there is some justification for only listing the most recent entries in something like a link or news blog, or the kind of “thought for the day” podcast that a lot of people seem to produce, I can’t imagine anyone would want to start listening to a story from anywhere other than the beginning. Duh.
So, just in case anyone else is syndicating an audio book and heading for this problem, make sure your RSS feed is locked down to include all the episodes, right from the start, not just the last 10.
If I can find the first 15 episodes I might listen to the story, otherwise it’s just wasted space and bandwidth. Please wise up guys.
Read more (well, read some, anyway) at ThePodcastNetwork :: Claybourne
Admittedly, it’s obviously aimed at video, but “videfest” still sounds like a good thing to tag- on podcasting. And if you have been thinking about adding pictures (moving or otherwise) to the sounds, it’s a natural:
VIDFEST is for the creators and producers of digital content. It’s a chance to meet with peers from all over the world, see their work, develop new partnerships, and engage your mind by listening and talking to people like you who explore and push the boundaries of creativity in digital media.
Read more at Vancouver International Video Festival (VIDFEST) 2005 | Bryght
Laura Swisher lost her Minidisc recorder, and posted looking for suggestions on a replacement for use in podcasting. There’s already a few comments with various suggestions, but I’m sure she’d appreciate the views of a few podcastplayer.org readers.
Personally, I think she’d be nuts to get anything other than a good medium-cost flash recorder. There are a lot of people doing podcasts on iRiver flash devices, and I love my little 512MB EZAV. I can imagine that old, slow, heavy, power-hungry, short-duration, moving-parts-and-noise from-motors technology like minidisc or tape would be any sort of cometitor to a sleek modern flash recorder, but it will be interesting to see how she gets on.
I hope she posts a followup to let us know.
Read more at: Swisher’s Untitled Blog Project: Where My Geeks At?
As I mentioned back in March, Scott Sigler is busy publishing his novel “Earthcore” as a podcast series. I’m finding it compulsive listening.
The story is pretty compelling, with an interesting range of characters, locations and situations. I have to bow to Scott’s voice acting talents - the voices are recognizably his, but still recognizably different from each other. I guess it’s a small hazard of doing it this way, but sometimes the vocal differences tend toward caricature rather than character - the Australian accent of the lead mining engineer seems a bit of a stretch to me, for example. These are only very minor niggles, though.
Counting all the episodes so far, his is easily the lengthiest podcast I’ve listened to, and that has had some intriguing effects that I wasn’t expecting. Listening to a continuing story while going about normal life has led to some strange audio/visual associations. I listened to the section where Sonny the Prospector met up with Herb the Assayer, while browsing in Maplin (an electronics and audio store), for example, so that’s the image that always comes to mind when I think of Herb or his office.
Some parts of the story have been delightfully tense. The meeting between Herb and Kayla the Psycho would have had me on the edge of my seat if I hadn’t been walking into work at the time.
If I have any criticisms they are probably only relatively minor things about the presentation and sequencing of the episodes. I can’t help feeling that Scott, in common with many podcasters, is stuck in the idea that people will be listening to each episode as it is released. Real podcast listeners are not always like that - I usually wait until I have downloaded a whole audio book before starting listening to it, for example, or listen to a directory full of a particular podcast in one go.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the “Previously on Earthcore” and “Next Episode” headers and footers that appear on every episode. When you are listing to a whole sequence in one hit, such things just get in the way and dilute the tension of story rather than building it.
Similarly, the bundling of chapters seems a bit odd. I’m lucky in that I struggled to find a player that will remember where I had got to when I switch it off, but I know that many don’t. Given that the story splits naturally into smallish chapters, it seems strange to provide them for download only as clusters of two or three. Drip-feeding them one chapter every few days would seem a better alternative on the surface (and avoid the “oops” of inadvertently using an “&” in the filename which prompted a re-post of one such chunk).
Once again, though, I must emphasise just how trivial my suggestions are in comparison to the excellent quality of the podcast as a whole. I really can’t wait for each new episode, and each one goes straight to the top of my playlist as it comes in.
And I’d like to give a nod to the web support, which really adds to the listening/reading experience. See a map of the mountain! Visit the faux earthcore web site! Read Scott trying to contain his excitement!
Well done Scott and the Dragon Page.
Read more, and subscribe if you haven’t already done so, at EarthCore: A Podcast Novel
I’ve been having some fun downloading and watching a whole bunch of video blogs (a.k.a vlogs, a.k.a video podcasts, a.k.a videocasts, a.k.a “vogs") over the last few days. Some are wierd, some are personal, some are arty, some are funny. All in all, well worth doing - a lot like podcasts, really.
There are a few strange things about the “vlog” culture, though.
Most significant to me is the way that the videoblogging world seems so separate to the podcasting world. To my naive understanding they have much more in common than they have differences, and yet, I only stumbled on a cluster of vlog feeds pretty much by accident, despite studying podcasting for several months.
Another strange thing is the apparent reverence for the “ant” catcher/player tool - among many vloggers it seems that “ant” is the only way to find and watch vlogs. Unfortunately, ant is Mac-only, cutting off the majority of computer users. Use of this tool seems so entrenched that (even though there is a set of feeds included with ant) they don’t bother listing any interesting feeds on the ant site for us poor Mac-less.
I can only guess that some of these strangenesses are due to the lack of a charismatic centre figure to hang it on. No vlogging “celebs” yet, not even a crusty old ex MTV dude.
The Freesound Project aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License. The Freesound Project provides new and interesting ways of accessing these samples, allowing users to
* browse the sounds in new ways using keywords, a “sounds-like” type of browsing and more
* up and download sounds to and from the database, under the same creative commons license
* interact with fellow sound-artists!We also aim to create an open database of sounds that can also be used for scientific research. Many audio research institutions have trouble finding correctly licensed audio to test their algorithms. Many have voiced this problem, but so far there hasn’t been a solution.
I recently spent a few days away from my computer and the internet, so I had a chance to catch up on a bunch of podcasts I had grabbed but not got around to listening to. One of them was Outchurched, a series of phone interviews from “The One True” Dan Tripp and “the” Ryan King. Both guys consider themselves to be “outchurched” - they have a strong Christian background, but don’t get on well with the American Church in its various forms. The podcast is largely discussions between these guys as they share their background and thoughts, and work through their issues. It’s a kind of mild-mannered session from a therapist’s waiting room.
One of their claims is that they want to steer clear of the jargon and loaded terms used in many Christian discussions. In practice they seem to be inventing almost as many of their own as they go along - the eponymous “outchurched” and Dan’s favourite “churchianity” to name just two. The podcast episodes I listened to sounded interesting enough that I recorded and sent an “audio” comment, and you can hear Dan and Ryan dissect it in their podcast number seven.
Read more at Outchurched, or subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed.
While I was attending the conference I mention in the ‘cast, I browsed the sprawling Christian bookstall, and was intrigued to find The Christian Culture Survival Guide, which takes a humorous aim at some of the same absurdities. If you like Dan and Ryan’s take on things, you may want to pick up a copy, even if it’s only for the bullet-point asides like “Fifteen Kinds Of Church People To Look Out For", and “Eight Ways To Know If You Might Be Worshipping Your Pastor".
Anyone who’s interested in podcasting and media in general will probably have enountered a lot of trumpeting about “the long tail". This is the idea that although there are potentially rich pickings in the servicing the “most popular” of something, in reality there can actually be a larger potential market in “the rest". There’s plenty of web material available if you want to read more, for example this blog, this wikipedia entry, or this wired article.
This all sounds wonderful. The idea of empowering customer choice by making the whole “back catalog” available is an enticing prospect.
BUT, similar forces to those that pushed everything from superstores to TV stations into concentrating on the single largest identifiable group are at work in podcasting and other alternative media. Even though most pundits seem to prefer to ignore them.
Consider these recent blog entries:
From Digital Strips : The Web Comics Podcast with Zampzon & Daku:
we’re running a little tight on server space so we are going to have to trim down the show archives a bit. I will limit the archived shows to 8 episodes at a time. Now is your last chance to grab our earlier ones.
From Dave’s Chalkboard:
I didn’t download the podcasts as the episodes were being aired the first time because I didn’t want to listen to them so soon. Now that I want to listen to them, they are not available.
Supporting the long tail with anything other than hot air costs. It costs in storage space. It costs in index complexity. It places an ever-increasing burden on the freedom to change site designs and structures.
The most insidious part of all this, though is the way that RSS has become almost entirely a “what’s new” mechanism. Finding a few “most recent” podcasts, or blogs, or whatever is easy. Finding anything else is ridiculously hard. As an example, I recently discovered RocketBoom. I liked the few I received from the feed and wanted to download some older issues. But they are not in the feed. Instead I had to trawl through a complex and somewhat irritating set of “archive” web pages, each of which tried to force me to play the show in-page rather than offering a simple download link. In the end I wrote a small script in ruby which guessed at archived filenames and sat in the background trying the next one then sleeping for a while. Still didn’t get a complete set though.
As more and more podcasts, videoblogs, digital photos, independent music and other large media files hit the limits of storage, I predict we are going to see a huge shakeout of old stuff. In turn, the culture will subtly change, and people will take to pre-emptively grabbing stuff “just in case” rather than relying on it being on the net if they need it. Unfortunately this will just move the burden from storage to bandwidth, increasing costs for everyone.
So. if you can, please please commit to keeping all your old material available. And provide RSS lists of the old stuff, so it can be grabbed by regular RSS media-catcher software.
Another intriguing idea. A speech-recognizing search engine that “listens” to podcasts and indexes the words. The site is full of bullish claims, but I think I’ll wait until I see it in action before jumping on the bandwagon.
Podscope is the Internet’s first spoken-word search engine for audio and video podcasts.
Theoretically, parsing words from something like a podcast should be a better deal than real-time speech-recognition. The software can take as long as it likes (within reason) trying different approaches to get a reasonable result. What worries me, though is the diverse nature of podcasters and podcast content.
All real-time speech-recognition systems that I’m aware of require some sort of “training", to get a grip on how the speaker uses even well-known words. Attempting to process an unknown podcast which may be in any language, in any accent, may be a mixture of voices, may have background music or chunks of non-spoken content seems a tall order.
My guess is that they will initially just “cherry pick” words that they are pretty sure about, and simply not index the rest. The trouble is that this is often the opposite of what’s needed when providing a searchable index. When searching you quickly learn that searching for rarer, more-specific words provides a better result; but these are just the kind of words that an automatic parser will lack the context to recognize.
Maybe they’ll get smart and support a wiki-style mass-participation system to allow anyone to correct words and feed back into teaching the system about hot ideas and specific podcasting styles.
Read more at: podscope - We’re listening. You’re searching
I’ve seen this all over the blogs, but I had to mention it. A bunch of ex-names from BBC radio are making shows available in a paid podcast format. The deal seems to be that they put together a “radio"show lasting an hour or so, play some music (but only 60% of each track), do the DJ talk thing, and generally massage the nostalgia of people who used to listen to radio back when it seemed to matter.
You pay roughly the same as an iTunes song, but get an hour of part-songs and relatively mindless blithering. Seems inoffensive enough, but I can’t say that I’ll be rushing to buy any.
Read more at Podshows.com
As I browse the net, I’m looking to collect details of the hardware and software that people use to create their ‘casts. Here’s the setup used by “mrbrown":
This is where all it happens. My little “studio” for the mrbrown show.
Read more at: mrbrown: mrbrown’s podcast workstation
“tgermer” at NorthWest Noise points out how ludicrous it is to criticise podcasts because there are too many. I agree; it’s like saying that there are too many books in libraries and bookshops, so we should close them all and just have “Readers Digest"…
Many people continue to see podcasting as a negative because they are unable to “consume” or “parse” large amounts of information.
Read more at: Northwest Noise: Manage This!
I’m sure this kind of press release will keep on popping up. More “traditional broadcasters” are trying to muscle-in on podcasting.
It began as a quirkly phenomenom among individuals who wanted to create their own radio shows for on-demand delivery to users of iPods and mp3 players.
But, Podcasting has quickly caught the eye of traditional broadcasters who want “in” on what appears to be a great way to reach new listeners or at least old listeners who somewhere along the way became disenfranchised. Now another company has jumped into the Podcasting fray.
It’s a panic response, but fundamentally unjustified. The podcast market is not like “traditional broadcast". Traditional radio and TV stations make their money on the margins of economies of scale. Setting up studios, cables, transmitters, licences and all that stuff takes big up-front cash. But once in place, adding extra listeners is effectively free. So traditional broadcast companies have developed systems to capitalise on audience figures.
Podcasting turns that on its head. Creating and publishing a podcast is effectively free. But each additional listener adds an extra bandwidth burden. Put simply, podcasts with smaller audiences cost less. Adding extra “generic” listeners is an expense with little or no income associated with it.
Small-audience and ultra-precisely targetted, small-studio podcasts could be an advertisers dream, getting incredible returns per customer. Why pay a bundle to “broadcast” a message to 100,000 listeners who don’t give a fig, when you can “narrowcast” to 15 or 20 who have already expressed an interest for next to no cost?.
My prediction? traditional media will keep a “presence” in podcasting and other point-to-point distribution, but mainly to maintain credibility and keep up listener figures for existing broadcast delivery.
Read more at Radio Quickly Stealing Podcasting From the Original Podcasters
Darren Barefoot stood up to try and point out why he thinks podcasting is over-hyped. His article makes some interesting points, but the real meat of the page is in the comments, where a remarkably civilized discussion roams around the merits and drawbacks of podcasting.
For me, though, the original article can almost be reduced to the following quote:
Personally, I have no commute, and I find that I can’t listen to talking while I’m writing. So, that really limits the available hours for listening to podcasts.
I understand exactly where he is coming from. Listening to a podcast while doing any kind of “brain work” is ineffective and faintly ridiculous. It wasn’t until I got a portable player and started listening during otherwise “dead time” (commuting, chores, eye-time away from the computer monitor …) that I finally got the “high” from the “podcasting dope".
Many people already listen to recorded music at such times. If it works for you, fine. Podcasting is no big deal when you are already time-shifting and location-shifting your music.
Personally, I don’t much enjoy listening to recorded music, and I have never been able to find talk radio I’m interested in, when and where I’ve actually been available to listen. Podcasting neatly fills that gap.
I don’t usually listen to podcasts at my computer any more. That’s reserved for RocketBoom :)
Read more at: Why I’m Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope | Darren Barefoot
Apparently “Former Vice President” Al Gore and “entrepreneur” Joel Hyatt are manning the PR pumps for their new internet/TV venture “current":
Current will invite audiences to move beyond their roles as viewers to become active collaborators, encouraging them to help shape the network’s content and fulfill its mission – to serve as a TV platform where the voices of young adults can be heard.
“We want to transform the television medium itself, giving a national platform to those who are hungry to help create the TV they want to watch,” said Al Gore.
This sure sounds a lot like plain old public-access TV to me. Expect a lot of “Wayne’s World", if anybody can be bothered.
It also sounds a lot like some of the “put podcasts on the radio” ranting I’ve complained about in the past.
From the media creator’s point of view: When people have the freedom to create and publish whatever they want, and have it available to anyone in the world with an internet connection, why bother with the last step of giving it to a TV company (where they’ll probably gut it to meet broadcast decency requirements, or pad it with commercials).
From the viewer/listener’s point of view: Why be a slave to someone else’s playlist choice when you can pick and choose your own perfect blend?
Read more at Daily Wireless - Video Blog TV Channel
The Washinton post has a short aticle about getting into podcasting. Unlike lots of others it’s not just from the listener’s point of view, but actually encourages readers to make their own, complete with hardware and software recommendations:
BUILD YOUR OWN (CYBER) RADIO STATION. What’s a pundit without a mouthpiece? You’ll need one to get heard
The article hits a lot of the right buttons, but skips over the importance of RSS, leaving podcasting as just recording a rant and putting it on the web.
Read more at Create Your Own Podcasts (washingtonpost.com)
Astute readers may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything for the last few days. I’ve been away at a conference without net access. Which means, of course, that I have returned to a mountain of email and RSS to sift through.
At least I got to listen to some of the podcasts that I had downloaded, even though a load more have come in in the meanwhile.
It’s just so hard to get concrete details about a portable MP3 player beforebuying it. Over at CNet reviews, some people seem to be having problems playing files bigger than a few MB. That would blow a player out of the water for listening to podcasts. It might be wise to steer clear of the Samsung YP-MT6 if podcasts is your thing.
I’ve just bought a Samsung yp-mt6 and was very impressed with it until I ran into this problem: I record mostly classical music, and the first of several movements of one piece in mp3 format is slightly over 9mb in size. Whenever I try to get the player to play that track, it shuts down automatically and restarts. Another track of 6mb, however, will play. So I wonder if anyone has run into this problem, knows the cause, and possibly a solution?
Read more at samsung yp-mt6: mp3 file size limit?
There are more and more people trying to work out how to make money out of podcasting. A new entrant is Click Caster:
ClickCaster takes the complexity out of creating a podcast. It turns your computer into a small yet powerful recording studio, radio station and publishing company all in one simple and easy to use package.
It does with with a program and a service that allows you to very simply and easily create a recording/podcast on your computer, license it with a copyright, publish it on the internet so people can easily find it and subscribe to and promote it by listing it in the CastLister public podcasting directory.
They (plan to) offer a scaled service starting at $34.95/year for hosting and basic web software. The bit that makes ClickCaster interesting is the way that they offer higher priced options that include multitrack recording software, sound library, and even a mixer and microphones. This could make them a “one-stop-shop” for a new podcaster.
Apparently a free “beta” of this service starts some time this month (April 2005).
After tons of work, my third e-book is ready! This one is called The Audio: Interviewing, Field Audio, Voicetracking, and More and it is chock-full of tips for people who want to prepare any kind of radio or podcasting piece.
Read more at Third E-Book Ready: “All About the Audio: Interviewing, Field Audio, Voicetracking, and More”
Another general podcasting article, this time from ABC13 in Houston. As such artcles go it’s fairly meaty, but it still makes me smile the way that Adam Curry’s history as a hairy MTV VJ is always mentioned in these kind of articles as if it’s important information that everyone wants to know. Personally, I’ve never seen the guy or his show, and wouldn’t know him from … err … Adam.
Move over blogging, at the moment, podcasting is one of the hottest ‘it’ things on the web and it could stay that way for a while. Taking off last year, podcasting has taken the idea of the typed blog and dumped the text in favor of audio. Now anyone with a computer (or a phone in Holliman’s case) can reach out to the world and become an Internet broadcaster. So far, Holliman has around 1,000 listeners with some as far away as Germany and Sweden.
Read more at: ABC13.com: Houston podcasters becoming Internet celebrities but note that it tried to open a “popup".
There’s a lot to be said in favour of the Ruby programming language. I use it for a range of system programming and scripting tasks, particularly where a more “heavyweight” language such as Java or C++ would be too much.
So it’s nice to see that someone is working on a podcatcher written in Ruby.
Armangil’s podcatcher is a podcast client for the command line. This bug-fix release includes the following changes:
(1) added support for Ctrl-C to terminate execution,
(2) [James Carter patch] fixed the “OPML truncation” issue where a bad RSS feed was considered the last of the list,
(3) added robust handling of some illegal command line arguments.
I’m still searching for decent ID3-tag manipulation software for MP3 recordings. There are hundrends to choose from, but almost all of them seem designed to tinker with a very small range of values. Typically just artist, genre, album, and year. The ID3 format is capable of so much more, particularly things such as a “play count” to track which podcasts you have listened to, or large text like song lyrics or podcast “show notes” and “transcript".
I’ve recently downloaded ID3-TagIT - THE ID3-Tag-Editor for MP3. This is freeware (they suggest a paypal donation), and runs on Windows. The authors seem to try hard to open up almost all the ID3v2 tags. My only criticism is that some of the tags are still “second class citizens", For example, although I can configure a selection of tags to list next to each file in the MP3 browser, I can’t choose from the full set that can be edited - so no “play count” shown next to the file name :(
I still need to spend more time with this application to find everything its capable of, but if you want a powerful tag editor that understands the widest range of tags I’ve found so far, give it a spin.
Rich at geekfishing.net is pondering microphones for podcasting, and has gathered together some useful advice.
We’ve done some basic podcasting, but it is pretty clear that a great set of microphones is pretty important. The first recofing we did with an elcheapo headset, so now its time for a little more investment.
Read more at Geekfishing Blog: Lapel Microphones and a followup post a few days later with specific model choices.
California startup LA Pro Foil claim they have developed an effective, low-cost way of getting a lifelike"surround” effect from any recorded sound source (such as an iPod or generic MP3 player).
While investigating the properties of our patented low-profile Pro Foil ™ capacitive transmission surface, it became apparent that the non-linear phase distribution characteristics that were limiting its effect as a network platform had a very interesting effect. Audio-frequency signals decompose and distribute across the surface according to the phase characteristics with which they reached the recording microphone, and disperse their energy at an equivalent distance from the sound input to the material.
Recording an audio signal using even a low-cost microphone preserves these important phase characteristics. A simple amplification process is all that is needed to drive a sheet of Pro Foil ™. Current prototypes have relatively low power characteristics, and need to be placed close to the listener’s head for best effect.
Sounds an excellent way to get the most from podcast “soundseeing” recordings.
Read more at : News Shark: LA Pro Foil breaks surround sound barrier
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