Using spaced microphones with directional audio coding

Directional audio coding (DirAC) is a perceptually motivated method to reproduce spatial sound, which typically uses input from first-order coincident microphone arrays. This article presents a method to additionally use spaced microphone setups with DirAC. It is shown that since diffuse sound is incoherent between spatially separated microphones at certain frequencies, no decorrelation in DirAC processing is needed, which improves the perceived quality. Furthermore, the directions of sound sources are perceived to be more accurate and stable