Hey all!
Courtesy of Greg @beller now we have a corner for compact spherical arrays (aka watermelons) and I thought it would be a great idea to self-identify and throw a network meet and greet.
So what makes a watermelon count?
- Its spherical
- It has many speakers
- Which are driven independently
Own one? Worked with one? Plan on?
I’d love to hear from IKO users, 393 users and builders and everyone else.
Let us know where you are, what you’ve got, what you do with them or plan on doing?
For those who don’t know much about these, here’s a rundown of the kids in the family.
The order is semi-historical, semi-arbitrary and I’m including projects that I’m aware of and that are alive. I leave out omni-directional but not really discrete (non-multichannel) loudspeakers used in acoustic measurements.
1/ IEM & Sonible IKO
The pioneering project with 20 beefy loudspeakers.
A wonderful instrument, quite potent and capable.
AFAIK there’s probably around 15-30 of these around the world, primarily at research centers.
Some of them are mentioned on the ikoweave site run by Gerriet Sharma, but some of them are stealth.
393
It’s the offspring designed by Stefan Riedel, around his masters time at IEM.
Running on 15 × 2.5" speakers, and given its size - a great thing to start the adventure.
That’s what I did when I started my journey. I know some people built it around the world — from Germany and Austria all the way to Taiwan.
There has been a couple more, even more reduced to 1-7-1 and 1-7-0 layouts built by students at IEM.
Ottsonics "Death star"
The team over at Ottosonics did a project where they designed a couple of these, with a varying amount of transducers, but this project remains a bit veiled. 3D printed, but still mimicking the IKO’s platonic and printed as flat triangles/n-gons.
Slovox "Singing Watermelons"
It’s my take on the subject. Deigned parametrically as an entire family of instruments, ranging from 16 to 32 loudspeakers. We’re closing R&D stage and getting these ready for people this summer. It’s meant as a commercial, but affordable project meant for artists and orgs that want to expand into spatial sound.
Actually, this is the cornerstone development that sparked me launching Slovox, the R&D Lab for spatial sound.
Mini-Iko
Gary Hsu over there in Taiwan has been building these yellow Ferrari miniatures. The idea is probably “let’s see how small this can get”, and his work is probably the pinnacle of affordability. AFAIK atm, the main application seems to be ambisonic music player and a super-affordable entry point to the world of ambisonic playback.
Gary, you made it to this forum?
SAT’s Audiodice
Guys over at SAT in Canada developed the audiodice project a while ago. While these are not true beamforming instruments, they can be use spatially and SAT used many of them them creativel distributed across larger spaces.
Lastly, there is this project, which I know nothing about, so leave it as a challenge for ya’ll to identify.
Missed anything? Let me know!
Cheers,
Paco, the “Watemelon man”
Hi dear Patrick, this is Gary, I’m here ~ 
