Translation of a Higher Order Ambisonics Sound Scene Based on Parametric Decomposition

This paper presents a novel 3DoF+ system that allows to navigate, i.e., change position, in scene-based spatial audio content beyond the sweet spot of a Higher Order Ambisonics recording. It is one of the first such systems based on sound capturing at a single spatial position. The system uses a parametric decomposition of the recorded sound field. For the synthesis, only coarse distance information about the sources is needed as side information but not the exact number of them. In an experiment with multiple sources and reverberation, the proposed method shows good performance in terms of an instrumental measure and excellent performance in a subjective evaluation based on a MUSHRA listening test. A variant of the analysis stage increases localization performance and scores median subject ratings between 91 % and 99 % compared to the reference.