Parametric sound field reproduction methods, such as the Spatial Decomposition Method (SDM) and Higher-Order Spatial Impulse Response Rendering (HO-SIRR), are widely used for the analysis and auralization of sound fields. This paper studies the performance of various sound field reproduction methods in the context of the auralization of a critical listening room, focusing on fixed head orientations. The influence on the perceived spatial and timbral fidelity of the following factors is considered: the rendering framework, direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method, microphone array structure, and use of a dedicated center reference microphone with SDM. Listening tests compare the synthesized sound fields to a reference binaural rendering condition, all for static head positions. Several acoustic parameters are measured to gain insights into objective differences between methods. All systems were distinguishable from the reference in perceptual tests. A high-quality pressure microphone improves the SDM framework's timbral fidelity, and spatial fidelity in certain scenarios. Additionally, SDM and HO-SIRR show similarities in spatial fidelity. Performance variation between SDM configurations is influenced by the DOA estimation method and microphone array construction. The binaural SDM (BSDM) presentations display temporal artifacts impacting sound quality.

Two experiments have been conducted to investigate the perceptual effect of band-limited interchannel decorrelation between vertically oriented loudspeakers. The perceived vertical image spread (VIS) and tonal quality (TQ) of phantom auditory images have been subjectively assessed in multiple comparison trials. The aim of the article was to find a lower decorrelation boundary that provides a significant increase of VIS, whilst maintaining TQ close to that of the original source. For test stimuli, decorrelation was applied to natural sound sources and pink noise in groups of octave-bands, where the lowest band was varied between 63 Hz and 8 kHz and the upper band was fixed at 16 kHz, resulting in eight decorrelated conditions for each source. Unprocessed octave-bands below the lower boundary were reproduced simultaneously through the lower main-layer loudspeaker only, and a monophonic main-layer only condition was also included in the comparison alongside the decorrelated stimuli. Results reveal that vertical decorrelation of the 500 Hz octave-band and above tends to significantly increase VIS, similar to that of broadband decorrelation, with little impact on TQ. In some cases, decorrelation of higher octave-bands and above can also produce similar increases of VIS with less impact on TQ, however, this is shown to be largely source-dependent. These results suggest that vertical decorrelation of lower frequencies has little perceptual benefit, and band-limiting vertical decorrelation to higher frequencies is likely to reduce low frequency phase cancellation. Applications of such an approach include 2D-to-3D upmixing and binaural audio rendering, with additional implications for 3D audio recording.

Binaural technology becomes increasingly popular in the multimedia systems.This paper identifies a set of features of binaural recordings suitable for the automatic classification of the four basic spatial audio scenes representing the most typical patterns of audio content distribution around a listener.Moreover, it compares the five artificial-intelligencebased methods applied to the classification of binaural recordings.The results show that both the spatial and the spectro-temporal features are essential to accurate classification of binaurally rendered acoustic scenes.The spectro-temporal features appear to have a stronger influence on the classification results than the spatial metrics.According to the obtained results, the method based on the support vector machine, exploiting the features identified in the study, yields the classification accuracy approaching 84%.