Performance analysis of a planar microphone array for three dimensional soundfield analysis

Soundfield analysis based on spherical harmonic decomposition has been widely used in various applications. However, a major drawback of this method is the requirement of spherical or alternate 3D array geometries, which are often considered to be bulky. Recently, the design of a 2D planar microphone array capable of capturing 3D spatial soundfields was proposed. This design utilizes omnidirectional and differential microphones to capture soundfield components that are undetectable to conventional planar omnidirectional microphone arrays, thus providing the same functionality as spherical arrays designed for the same purpose. In this paper, we discuss the implementation and performance analysis of the above design with real audio recordings. We also compare the results with a commercially available spherical microphone array called the Eigenmike.