"In the summer of 1990 I was asked to become a consultant to a small residential German studio to the north of Munich. The ambitious owner was quite forward looking. He actually took up on many of the ideas I had been considering for studios and these resulted in the creation of what was called "The Virtual Room" by STUDIO SOUND (Nov 1990, available in the references section of this website)".

Built with Roger Quested the principal was realistic and logical but quite ahead of it's time. There was, at this time, no set standard for 5.1 in fact we didn't even know how many channels were to be designated for "surround" in broadcast applications. HDTV was new, we had one of the first HDTV projection screens in Europe. I considered our modified "Component Audio" Ambisonic B-Format to be the best approach to storing surround productions. From this format we could transcode/decode to practically any speaker layout and as such the productions would still have been today future-proof.

My company in the UK built an elaborate digital system for the processing of audio. A 16 channel mono input to B-Format output matrix whereby all channels could be allocated their own position, width, height and dominance settings. Also B-Format plus B-Format matrices for the stacking of many sound fields one over the other. We also had an 8 channel with single channel height information (periphony) decoder to decode B-Format to up to 8 channels and these could today have included 5.1 or even 6.1 for recordings made in 1991 for example.

We also built a microphone recording system to supply live sound sources in B-Format (MR1 see separate article).

All of this thinking was advanced for an industry embedded with stereo and not thinking of surround at that time. The consensus of opinion was that what we were doing was slightly insane. The developments subsequently have shown that the line of thought was correct and merely revolutionary in a positive way. On the one hand I was grateful to the owner for the opportunity to realise something radically new, but not so grateful for the financial disaster his allegedly less than legal monetary dealings left behind that resulted in the closing of the studio in 1994."