Improving Binaural Rendering with Bilateral Ambisonics and MagLS
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Bilateral Ambisonics has been recently proposed as an effective method to produce high-quality binaural renderings from order-limited Ambisonics sound fields. It achieves so by generating two Ambisonics sound fields at the ears’ positions (rather than one at the head centre) and employing time-aligned head-related impulse responses. It has been shown that this “ear-centric” coordinate system allows to produce accurate binaural signals at lower spatial orders than if using the traditional “head-centric” approach, albeit at the cost of a non-trivial implementation of head rotations. We propose to further improve Bilateral Ambisonics by combining it with the popular Magnitude Least Squares (MagLS) method in order to reduce spectral errors at high frequencies. This is achieved at the cost of larger high-frequency phase errors, which should though not be problematic from a perceptual point of view due to our poor sensitivity to high-frequency interaural phase differences. According to numerical analyses and a model-based evaluation, the proposed BiMagLS method may well be a direct improvement over standard Bilateral Ambisonics.