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

Room reflections assisted spatial sound field reproduction

With recent advances in surround sound technology, an increased interest is shown in the problem of virtual sound reproduction. However, the performance of existing surround sound systems are degraded by factors like room reverberation and listener movements. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to spatial sound reproduction in reverberant environments, where room reverberation is constructively incorporated with the direct source signals to recreate a virtual reality. We also show that the array of monopole loudspeakers required for reproduction can be clustered together in a small spatial region away from the listening area, which in turn enables the array's practical implementation via a single loudspeaker unit with multiple drivers