Matrix vs Discrete

[chucky3042]

But does the triple band encode smear the image when decoded by a single band processor?

I suspect not by much as the midband is where most of the action happens?

Probably slightly but it would be very minor due to our attack and decay times and it only dials things back when there is little surround. The truth is I have not tried it. You guys could try it yourself with the Suzanne Ciani quadraphonic demo record or our sample recording of Money of DSOTM which I could send.

 

[barfle]

We have spent around $1M on patents

That’s not hard to do. Then, of course, there are the maintenance fees. Not to mention having to prosecute anyone who you think might be infringing.

After working there for seven years (video recording technologies), I was pretty sure I never wanted to deal with the bureaucracy again. I understand some of the value, but it’s one deep rabbit-hole.

 

[Owen Smith]

After working there for seven years (video recording technologies), I was pretty sure I never wanted to deal with the bureaucracy again. I understand some of the value, but it’s one deep rabbit-hole.

Patent offices in different countries are quite different. The UK is much tighter on what sort of thing you can patent than the US, for example. In the US it appears you can patent almost anything, and it is expected to be fought in court later whether that was a reasonable thing to patent or not.

 

[barfle]

Patent offices in different countries are quite different. The UK is much tighter on what sort of thing you can patent than the US, for example. In the US it appears you can patent almost anything, and it is expected to be fought in court later whether that was a reasonable thing to patent or not.

Chucky’s patent was a US patent.

Yeah, I never understood how one could patent a “business method.” Not to mention how many “design patents” there are on teddy bears.

 

[chucky3042]

Chucky’s patent was a US patent.

Yeah, I never understood how one could patent a “business method.” Not to mention how many “design patents” there are on teddy bears.

We were patented in many other countries and due to financial reasons had to let a few lapse as you just keep getting hit with annual fees. Ultimately you question what is it worth and the only real answer is if you are getting investors or trying to be acquired by another company. If most of your cleverness is in software it is fairly secure in there. Your most effective patent is the provisional patent, its the first and cheapest step.

 

[par4ken]

We were patented in many other countries and due to financial reasons had to let a few lapse as you just keep getting hit with annual fees. Ultimately you question what is it worth and the only real answer is if you are getting investors or trying to be acquired by another company. If most of your cleverness is in software it is fairly secure in there. Your most effective patent is the provisional patent, its the first and cheapest step.

Interesting that the patent includes the QS coefficients which had already been patented by Sansui. Obviously those old patents have long expired. It just strikes me as odd that something old can be re-patented again.

I have to give your company much credit for pushing ahead with this against all odds. Much larger organisations would look at it and say that there is not enough money in it to bother! Please keep up the good work.

 

[barfle]

Interesting that the patent includes the QS coefficients which had already been patented by Sansui. Obviously those old patents have long expired. It just strikes me as odd that something old can be re-patented again.

I have to give your company much credit for pushing ahead with this against all odds. Much larger organisations would look at it and say that there is not enough money in it to bother! Please keep up the good work.

At least when I was working as a Patent Examiner, any prior art would cause a rejection of the claim. The purpose of the annual fees was to keep your patent active, which ONLY meant that you had “protection” (a government-protected monoply) on the idea. If you let it expire, it doesn’t mean that someone else can patent the idea, but it does mean that someone else can manufacture it without paying a royalty.

A patent can, and almost always does, describe an improvement on prior art. Hang a new doodad on an old thingamabob, and you can patent it. The old thingamabob is still what it was, but if your improvement is novel and can be made and used by someone with ordinary skill in the art, then you are eligible to pay issuance and maintenance fees on your patent.

 

[par4ken]

At least when I was working as a Patent Examiner, any prior art would cause a rejection of the claim. The purpose of the annual fees was to keep your patent active, which ONLY meant that you had “protection” (a government-protected monoply) on the idea. If you let it expire, it doesn’t mean that someone else can patent the idea, but it does mean that someone else can manufacture it without paying a royalty.

A patent can, and almost always does, describe an improvement on prior art. Hang a new doodad on an old thingamabob, and you can patent it. The old thingamabob is still what it was, but if your improvement is novel and can be made and used by someone with ordinary skill in the art, then you are eligible to pay issuance and maintenance fees on your paten

I agree, but if you look at the Involve patent sheet 2, Fig 2 you will see the QS encoding diagram and coefficients which could have been lifted directly from a Sansui patent.

 

[barfle]

I agree, but if you look at the Involve patent sheet 2, Fig 2 you will see the QS encoding diagram and coefficients which could have been lifted directly from a Sansui patent.

It’s worth noting that the drawings in a patent are used to help describe the invention. Since the SM is a matrix decoder, describing the various matrices that it can decode is useful in the description. However, the ONLY part of the patent that is enforceable is the claims, and the QS matrix drawing is one of the existing thingamabobs that Involve’s doodad is hanging on.

 

[par4ken]

It’s worth noting that the drawings in a patent are used to help describe the invention. Since the SM is a matrix decoder, describing the various matrices that it can decode is useful in the description. However, the ONLY part of the patent that is enforceable is the claims, and the QS matrix drawing is one of the existing thingamabobs that Involve’s doodad is hanging on.

I would have expected to have seen actual references to the original QS patents. Perhaps they are there but I missed them.

 

[barfle]

I would have expected to have seen actual references to the original QS patents. Perhaps they are there but I missed them.

There may have been reasons for referencing the prior art the way they did. Lawyers do things that the rest of us can never comprehend.

I’ve read enough patents, so I didn’t bother examining that one.

 

[chucky3042]

When I first started the 2 year process of working out how Involve decode would work, I looked at all sorts of basic surround matrix's and my conclusion was the most sensible was the Sansui equations. Its circular with no front/ back/ left/ right bias and so that became my starting point. On the decode patent the clever bits are not related to the QS equations but instead on how the "logic" steers the variomatrix and in particular on a hell of a lot of psycho-acoustic masking techniques we use and the weighting of the 3 separate matrix's to match how the brain thinks and what enables a better decode.

On the encode patent again the basic QS equation is maintained but again we added all the psycho-acoustic stuff as in the decode but our controversial "discovery" was our 12 dB rule (that crops up in our SST patent also). The problem with QS encode was that the resultant stereo image sounded somewhat compressed and not quite stereo. We conducted trials on chimps to determine what was the minimum separation where no one could pick the difference and to my surprise it was 12 dB, SQ was around 6 dB. This then lead to an idea that if the music had low surround content then you could dynamically with appropriate timing detune the matrix and the result would be way more like stereo and undetectable , but if surround was present to open the matrix to its full decode capacity. We then conducted trials on a static matrix with a parameter that achieved 12 db stereo separation and found the decode was still in excess of 25 dB. Then we trialed it on a full triband and played a lot with the parameters and weighed them more towards the quad production to establish what we now run today.

Please play the Suzanne Ciani quad record in stereo and in quad and you will hear the tweaking in not perceptible. I have said it many times that we are really a stereo company as I believe it is the only backward/ forwards compatible format- unlike ATMOS ....tried playing it on a normal stereo set?

The above was worst case on FIXED TONES not on music, in the real world of music the apparent results would be way better.

 

[MidiMagic]

And note there are some people with an extra set of colour receptors who can perceive more colours.

Actually, they just make parts of the spectrum more compressed in color sensory range while making other parts of the spectrum color insensitive.

There are still the same number (3) of encoded channels sent to the brain.

 

[MidiMagic]

We have spent around $1M on patents

I had enough fun getting my software copyright - and now the copyright is totally useless because the equipment the software was designed to control has long been discontinued.

 

[barfle]

I had enough fun getting my software copyright - and now the copyright is totally useless because the equipment the software was designed to control has long been discontinued.

I worked for a company that patented a way of locating start and stop points on a video tape, and the patent was written for videotape. If it had been written more broadly, they would be getting royalties from every LaserDisc, DVD and Blu-ray with chapters on it.

 

[MidiMagic]

And so while we let companies put profits over compatibility with older technologies, think of these scenarios:

1. We almost lost all the data collected in the 1960 census.
IBM changed out older tape drives to newer models on all of their computers in 1961. But they didn't tell anyone the new drives would not read the old tapes. That data would be gone forever if they had not found an old-computer collector who had the computer and drives to read the tapes and print them out.

2. In the early 2000s, a company was ordered to bring to court all of their financial records from their previous 15 years. They brought in floppy disks containing all of their data. The court could not read most of it:
- All of the records before 1994 were in Lotus 123 on the MS-DOS operating system. There were no computers available that could read the data. IBM bought out Lotus to make people use their software instead.
- Microsoft Excel could read Lotus 123 files, but for only a few upgrades. Then Microsoft decided it was "too expensive" to maintain backward compatibility. But this company had relied on the early support in Excel and expected it to continue. And new Excel can't read some old Excel files.
- Nothing could be found to read 8-inch and 5.25-inch floppy disks.
- New computers cannot run any version of older Windows (XP and earlier) or MS-DOS.
The company lost the lawsuit because it could not prove the assertions.

3. In 2004, I was working as a lab engineer at IU. One group was trying to do a 25-year study, and they were in the 12th year of the study when the last computer they originally bought (in 1982, before I started working there) for the study (including the spares they bought) failed. There was no way to move the study over to new computers. They could not even read their old data on new equipment. I found a data extraction program, but some of the data were not extracted correctly. The program that controlled the experiment would not run on newer computers, and the control interface PC card would not fit the bus slots in the new computers. The study was ruined. They could not even use the data they had already collected. Progress and profit ruins all.

4. In the 1970s, I read a novel, "The Day the Machines Stopped". It was about a sudden change that caused all electrical devices to stop working. Electricity refused to flow. Only a few devices continued to work: Diesel engines started by a spring or gunpowder starter, firearms, wind-up phonographs, bicycles, gas stoves, and animal propelled vehicles.
Imagine this scenario: Nuclear "scientists" accidentally set off a device that destroys Tehran and everything within a 200-mile radius. It also destroys every semiconductor device in the world. No more electronics other than tube equipment that does not contain semiconductors. Power-line MOV lightning arrestors become short-circuits. No computers. No cars with semiconductors controlling the engine or transmission. All CD, DVD, and BluRay players and all TVs and radios quit working. No working satellites. No LED lightbulbs. And no more semiconductor manufacture (controlled by computers). Back to wind-up phonographs? And no music that was not recorded on records. Most surroundsound is matrix again.

5. Look at all of the mess that a failed Microsoft update caused this week.

Do you really want companies to profit by deprecating old technologies? Think!

 

[Owen Smith]

1. We almost lost all the data collected in the 1960 census.

The UK did lose all the data collected in the 1931 census. Admittedly that was caused by the Luftwaffe, but you would have thought it would have been moved somewhere safe.

 

[Owen Smith]

5. Look at all of the mess that a failed Microsoft update caused this week.

It wasn't Microsoft, it was a Crowdstrike update.

 

[SeeMoreDigital]

Lol...

There's no excuse keeping old digital data on tape drives, floppy discs, CD's etc. It's should be the responsibility of businesses and authorities to transfer their data to newer storage mediums as they become available. I used to do this with all the businesses I worked at. Indeed, I've still got a USB connected floppy drive reader somewhere.

Only a few days ago a friend asked me if I had anything that could read his old floppy disks, compact flash, SmartMedia cards and zip drives. Luckily for him I did and everything is now copied onto a couple of USB thumb drives...

 

[jimfisheye]

Haha...

That #2 above sounds carefully orchestrated!

The Crowdstrike thing. Relying on an online connection for anything and especially on the OS or app layer is pure operator error. And hilarious!