About Us

Blue Ripple Sound and Higher Order Ambisonics

We've been enthusiastic about Higher Order Ambisonics for a while and were incorporated in 2007 with the aims of researching and developing it - and bringing it to the World!

Ambisonics has been around for a while. It was developed originally by a brilliant mathematician called Michael Gerzon (and others!) in the seventies and its mathematical framework has been developed further over the years, mostly by the academic community. It has always sounded great and it's now even better. Historically it has not been widely used, mostly because there's not much audio material mastered in the right formats and because it has been hard to set up (there have been a number of broken implementations out there).

Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA) has improved the spatial resolution possible beyond "Classic" Ambisonics. It's scalable, so you can add more detail depending on the CPU power or bandwidth you have available.

HOA is ideal for computer games. Here, there isn't a problem with formats, because all the audio is prepared within the game - and we've worked hard to integrate seamlessly into Windows' multi-channel set up, so generally there shouldn't be anything else to do to get HOA working. (Though if you want to set up a complicated advanced layout we've a tool for that too...)

To get the ball rolling, we're also taking a "build-it-and-they-will-come" approach to HOA playback. We actually ship a fully-featured HOA Player with the Rapture3D packages you can buy on this website and we have all sorts of HOA recording, processing and analysis tools waiting in the wings for a good application...

Research and Development

We're always interested in new ideas and applications around HOA - and related spatial audio technologies. Please get in touch! We're based in London and can be contacted at info@blueripplesound.com.

Legal Stuff

Our registered address is:

Blue Ripple Sound Limited c/o BSG Valentine Lynton House
7-12 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9BQ UK

Company Number: 6571739

VAT Registration Number: 933 4246 31