Evaluation of Compressed Higher-Order Ambisonics at Off-Center Listening Positions

This paper evaluates the quality of OPUS-compressed 1st-, 3rd-, and 5th-order Ambisonics at off-center listening positions in a studio with a hemispherical loudspeaker arrangement. The audio signals were compressed with 16, 32, and 64 kb/$s$ per channel and compared to an uncompressed 5th-order reference in a listening experiment. Audio scenes comprised frontally panned speech and music with and without surrounding reverberation. The experiment reveals the requirements of Am-bisonics order and channel bandwidth to achieve excellent quality in dependence of the audio material and listening position for streaming of spatial audio across different venues.