Comparison of Techniques for Binaural Navigation of Higher-Order Ambisonic Soundfields
Type
Soundfields that have been decomposed into spherical harmonics (i.e., encoded into higher-order ambisonics - HOA) can be rendered binaurally for off-center listening positions, but doing so requires additional processing to translate the listener and necessarily leads to increased reproduction errors as the listener navigates further away from the original expansion center. In this paper, three techniques for performing this navigation (simulating HOA playback and listener movement within a virtual loudspeaker array, computing and translating along plane-waves, and re-expanding the soundfield about the listener) are compared through numerical simulations of simple incident soundfields and evaluated in terms of both overall soundfield reconstruction accuracy and predicted localization.