Surround by Sound: A Review of Spatial Audio Recording and Reproduction

In this article, a systematic overview of various recording and reproduction techniques for spatial audio is presented. While binaural recording and rendering is designed to resemble the human two-ear auditory system and reproduce sounds specifically for a listener’s two ears, soundfield recording and reproduction using a large number of microphones and loudspeakers replicate an acoustic scene within a region. These two fundamentally different types of techniques are discussed in the paper. A recent popular area, multi-zone reproduction, is also briefly reviewed in the paper. The paper is concluded with a discussion of the current state of the field and open problemsThe authors acknowledge National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) No. 61671380 and Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme DE 150100363

Multichannel acoustic echo cancellation in the wave domain with increased robustness to nonuniqueness

Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) is significantly more challenging in the case of multichannel reproduction compared to the single-channel case. This is mainly due to the so-called nonuniqueness problem, which becomes especially severe for massive multichannel reproduction systems like, e.g., wave field synthesis systems or higher-order ambisonics, where the different loudspeaker signals are often strongly correlated. In this paper, a multichannel wave-domain AEC structure is proposed that maintains robustness without altering the loudspeaker signals, as is commonly required to preserve the reproduction quality. The proposed method exploits the dominance of certain couplings in the wave-domain representation of the loudspeaker-enclosuremicrophone system. In this representation, preferring a strong weight of the dominant couplings in the identified system improves the system identification performance. A modification of the wellknown generalized frequency-domain adaptive filtering algorithm is then presented to implement the proposed approach, including a self-contained description of all necessary components. An experimental evaluation compares the proposed method to competing approaches and shows that the proposed method compares well in terms of convergence behavior while avoiding the performance degradation, which is intrinsic to other approaches