Perceptual Compensation of Reproduction Room Acoustics for Ambisonics Recordings

Ambisonics is a method for capturing and rendering a sound field accurately if the acoustics of the playback room does not influence the sound field significantly. The acoustics of playback room may, however, cause a noticeable reduction of sound quality. We propose a perceptually-motivated recording and rendering system based on Ambisonics that compensate the reverberation of playback room. In this method, the direct and reverberant sound field components are separated in the spherical harmonics domain which are then spectrally adjusted such that after rendering on the loudspeaker array in the playback room, certain perceptual optimization criteria matched between the recording room and playback room. The perceptual optimization criterion aims for conserving the spectral powers of the direct and reverb sound parts and the Interaural Coherence (IC) of the combined direct and reverb sounds in each auditory band. In contrast to the conventional Ambisonics, only three channels are used for sound rendering of a single source. The subjective ratings of a listening test show a perceptually accurate rendering of the original recorded sound field using the proposed method. In addition, the subjective evaluation showed that this method is robust to the head rotation and small displacements within the reproduction room.This project was supported by Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft as part of the Sonderforschungsbereich 1330 Hörakustik (HAPPAA), Project C