I'm fully in support of this technology becoming main stream in music and movies. It'd bring a whole new realm of possibilities for storytelling as well as character acting.
Can you imagine a radio drama where you hear the entire thing from a silent protagonists perspective? It'd be awesome.
How about a first-person horror or crime thriller radio drama where you're in turns the victim, the murderer, the detective and, for some reason, a small dog?
This technology peaked in the mid 80s, it's not new at all. And yeah, a basic binaural recording rig is pretty simple, although a really well designed one is still a couple thousand dollars.
Basic binaural recordings aren't new. They have a foam head with microphones in it that picks up sound in pretty much the same way as the human ear. It only goes so far, though. The results of simply recording it isn't that interesting. In order to make it sound sharp and realistic, they put it through the "cetera" algorithm and then you get that spatial effect.
The problem is that this algorithm that they use is owned by a company that makes hearing aids. Hearing aids! And because of that, it's a trade secret. They're not going to sell the license to anyone for recording purposes or otherwise. All this stuff you see, especially the 'holophonic' recordings were originally just promotional material created to sell the hearing aids.
Even if it did peak I don't think it's ever been used to its full potential, because I have yet to find a crime drama where I get to be a dog. But apparently there's a conspiracy against its full potential from the hearing aid people...
This has been floating around the Internet for ages. You can make your own pretty easily with a binaural recording rig, which you can put together pretty cheaply.