Holophone - Surround sound mic
 

The Holophone. A strange bird of a mic. What do you think?

3 versions:
- Mini
- Prosumer
- H2-Pro (shipping)

This would be pretty cool if it works well. Any idea on what the pro model costs?

I had to go find out something on this thing. :)

Here's a review of it. The end of the review says "Yes, the $6,000 price tag is steep"

Here's a site that's selling it for $6k: http://www.vfgadgets.com/holophone.htm

Who do you think will have one of these first? My money is on DSE :).

I don't see a lot of practical use for that. Wouldn't the rear mics pick up the camera operator a fair bit? Plus, camera motor noise would probably be an issue.

I was thinking that same thing for the camera mounted version. On the pro version, I would think that you would set the mic and whatever multi-channel recorder you use in a different place than the camera.

Something tells me DSE won't be getting that.
How 'bout it, DSE?

They had a booth set up at the AES show in NYC a few weeks back. the camcorder model that they had on display stood about 7 inches above the camcorder on top of a SRS type of encoder that pumped out encoded 2 channel into the camcorder inputs. you would then run the audio through a decoder plugin to get surround, Kind of like dolby pro-logic but they haven't got the dolby license yet. They said they were talking about $2500 for the camcorder model which isn't bad considering other alternatives. I have a demo DVD of their pro model which isn't bad. The one they had on display had the same mic like the mini in the link but it sat on top of an encoder that was about 5 or so inches high, 3 inches wide and about 1/2" thick. They also had an army helmet version that they were designing to be used to hear where other people were in relation to you. pretty freaky stuff. When talking with them, they said there were some issues mounting it to the camcorder that made people uneasy when panning around. they found that keeping it in one place sat better with viewers.

I don't really know much about this subject, but
what is it? It has 5 cardioid mikes inside pointed off
in all different directions? And if they don't have
a Dolby license, what DVD player will be able to
decode the 2 channels into 6? And the 2 channels
that they feed the camcorder has some type
of 5.1 encoding laid on it?

I stumbled into something similar from Cascade Audio.

http://www.cascade-audio.com/

The SSM runs around a bit over a hundred bucks I remember..
EDIT: The price is $49
http://reasonproducts.com/ssm/index.php

Plain old matrix Dolby surround is encoded with L,R, L+R, L-R into two channels right? [Almost like the old Quadraphonic records.]