> It took a heavy amount of investment, organization, and talent to get to the point of stereophonic sound alone.

Sure, because that adds a ton of new complexity!

Going from 2 to 3+ in a digital format does not add complexity.

Is certainly can add complexity when you consider bandwidth and/or processing constraints.

If you figure out a particularly clever way to save on those, sure.

But the baseline of "okay, compressed audio isn't very demanding, throw 3x as much bandwidth and processing at it" does not add meaningful complexity.

Yup. Joint encoding [1] is really the main thing, but that's something that codecs already do, ever since MP3 with stereo music.

The overall point remains: multichannel open container formats exist, and open audio codecs exist. An open standard for 5.1 surround sound, for example, seems like a relatively straightforward combination of the two. I'm not saying you can do it overnight, but compared to other open-source efforts, it's tiny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_encoding

Multichannel joint encoding doesn't sound trivial to me.

Hmm, it's not:

https://patents.google.com/patent/JPH1051313A/en

Ugh. That just looks like someone's attempt to optimise some aspect, rather than anything fundamentally needed for the concept to work.

That's like saying "we should all drive hydrogen cars because you can just replace all the existing petroleum infrastructure with hydrogen infrastructure." Yes, but you have to execute on that. Any practical use of digital multichannel audio must consider bandwidth and decoding power as constraints.

When we're looking at video content, the audio processing for stereo is a tiny fraction of the bandwidth and power. Tripling that effort barely makes a difference.

In terms of petroleum infrastructure, it's like slightly adjusting the ratios at the refinery.

> Going from 2 to 3+ in a digital format does not add complexity.

What adds complexity is determining how many channels to use and what to put through them.

That is the important part now.

Have you worked on multi channel encoding/decoding or mixed a multi-channel project?