So I shelled out for a big bad ass 7th order ambisonic delay plugin. Unfortunately, that appears to require about a 64-multichannel channel. I got a little bit excited when I was able to create a 3rd Order Ambisonic channel in. I selected the largest option… the plugin says the channel is too small for 3rd order and downgraded me to 2nd order. I understand what a big task I’m asking of my DAW, but this is Nuendo. This is supposed to be the end all be all for Dolby Atmos. There must be a DAW out there that can handle this if they’re selling these, so Nuendo not being at the top of that list is unaccepptable. Am I missing something? Surely there must be a way in Nuendo 12, right??
The plugin has an issue if it says it can’t do 3OA, that requires 16-channels which Nuendo supports. It does not support 64-channel groups for 7OA, however. There’s not much that does support that, as it is of questionable utility and uses a lot of resources to literally do 64-channel processing every step of the way. Pro Tools doesn’t, near as I know. Reaper is the only DAW I’m aware of that does.
I’m not sure how worth it that would be. Really to hear the difference for more than 3OA, you’d need more than 16 speakers which is something few have and going up to 7OA would mean literally a 4x (or more) increase in load over doing 3OA because of all the additional processing.
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Thanks. You’ve given me some things to think about. Id prefer to work entirely in Nuendo, but I suppose I could run it in Reaper and send Reaper out to 64channels in Nuendo or something if I ever decide 7 is necessary.
Ill be looking to find a larger studio in another couple years, or whenever the real estate market around here stops asking double and even triple what the properties are actually worth lol. When we do, Ill probably be switching from 7.1.4 to 9.2.6.
If Sony 360 somehow takes over before then, Ill probably be forced to add more monitors either way; so I need to figure this out whether its doable right now or not.
CPU shouldn’t be much of a concern once I get our IT guy to come figure out why Nuendo’s resource meter is overloading at times, despite the whole PC never using even ⅓ of the CPU or RAM.
Once I figure out how to configure it so that Nuendo will use the resources, Ill be replacing the 16-core + 128GB DDR4 PC with a 96-core +1TB DDR5 PC. 
So just note that 9.x.6 is still only 15 speakers so while there are some differences in terms of layout and conversion, 3OA is still generally going to be fine. You might, in theory, hear a small improvement with 4OA but probably not and very probably not past that.
Hence the lack of interest with many DAWs in supporting it. It is more of one of those geeky neat in theory but not useful in practice kind of things. Reaper loves those, but most vendors don’t bother. Same deal with Reaper and plugin oversampling, they support up to 64x which is just not useful in any real scenario but appeals to some audio geeks.
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