SoundField
SoundField is a joint marque bringing together SoundField's pioneering ambisonic microphone technology with RØDE Microphones. Its flagship product, the NT-SF1, uses the classic four-capsule tetrahedral array design at the heart of every SoundField microphone since 1978, paired with affordable, plugin-based processing that converts the raw A-format signal into B-format Ambisonics, first-order Ambisonic mixes, or binaural downmixes for headphone monitoring. Priced under $1,000, it was billed at launch as the world's first sub-$1,000 ambisonic microphone, bringing a technology previously reserved for high-end broadcast and film production within reach of independent and location recordists.
tech specs
history
+–
Ambisonics and the SoundField microphone trace back to the early 1970s, when mathematician Peter Craven and Michael Gerzon realised that four small-diaphragm capsules arranged in a tetrahedral pattern could capture a tightly coincident, full-sphere sound image; working with Ken Farrar at British manufacturer Calrec, they built a prototype in 1975, and Calrec launched the first commercial SoundField microphone in 1978. Calrec merged with AMS in the late 1980s and stepped back from microphone manufacturing in 1993, at which point SoundField Limited was established as a separate company, sourcing capsules from Germany's MBHO. In 2012, SoundField's then-owners Ken Giles and Pieter Schillebeeckx sold the company to TSL Products, which spent the following four years developing MKII versions of the DSF controllers, the SurroundZone plug-in and the ST-450, alongside the SPS200, which replaced the bulky external controller with four XLR outputs for direct software-based processing. In 2016, The Freedman Group, parent company of RØDE Microphones, acquired SoundField from TSL, and in April 2018 launched the joint SoundField By RØDE marque at the NAB show in Las Vegas, followed that September by the NT-SF1, the first microphone released under the collaboration.
back to tools
