ABSTRACT
Cinema played a central role in the development of incarnations of multichannel audio and immersive audio. One hopes that digital streaming can liberate multichannel audio for musical applications. The benefits of more channels were recognized very early in the history of audio, notably when the Bell Telephone Laboratories investigated the reproduction of a realistic auditory perspective. All audio codecs are scalable, meaning that the amount of data compression can be adjusted according to bandwidth/data-rate availability. At each stage of audio evolution, from mono to stereo to multichannel, there have been arguments that it is not necessary. Upmixers may be optimized to convert standard stereo music recordings into multichannel versions. Multichannel loudspeaker reproduction is more obvious, because each channel and its associated loudspeaker create an independently localizable sound source, and interactions between multiple loudspeakers create opportunities for phantom sources and impressions of movement.
