In a Digital Broadcasting Symposium workshop session yesterday, Toni Fiedler, a Ton Meister Expert from Fraunhofer Institute described new trends in recording and broadcasting immersive 3D sound.

Fiedler gave examples of surround sound that can be all around and above you, using speaker configurations such as 7.1 around you 4 speakers above you. This configuration is known as 7.1+4.

Recording sound to take advantage of surround configurations is no easy matter, but the experts at Fraunhofer have been experimenting with the best methods to capture 3D sound and have come up with a range of mic placement techniques and built new mixing software that allows the audio engineer to use a joy stick to move sound around and above the listener.

Fiedler mentioned a very effective, but expensive, 3D mic called the EigenMike (pictured above), which is perfect for 3D location recordings.

Editing software that can handle 3D recordings includes Protools, Nuendo, Reaper and Sequoia.

Fraunhofer uses embedded metadata in the 3D recordings to solve some of the complexities of how to assign the audio to various speakers in the listener’s home theatre system. There is also work being done on 3D speaker systems for cars.

“We have to think about how we record and mix the audio, and also about how those audio objects are rendered in the listener’s reproduction site,” explained Fiedler (pictured).