Ambisonics is a 360-degree surround sound encoding/decoding standard. 360-degree audio means full-sphere surround sound. Most of the relevant patents have now expired, so one can find open source tools for Ambisonics. Although developed in the 70s, Ambisonics has recently gained traction since YouTube, Oculus VR and Facebook adopted it as a standard for their 360-degree videos. Nowadays, Ambisonics has become a widely used 360-degree spatial audio standard in VR and 360 video use cases.
Figure 1: Ambisonics trademarkAmbisonics provides an immersive experience of surround sound where a listener can locate the sound coming from a particular direction in space. The sound source can also be located at a height, not just on the horizontal plane. So, in an Ambisonics rendering system, you would see loudspeakers not just at a height of the listener’s ear level but even above and below (Periphony). If the listener is using headphones, binaural processing based on HRTF filtering can be applied to Ambisonics output to provide the spatial effect.
Figure 2: Loudspeaker setup for Ambisonics
Figure 3: Mapping of B-format channelsFor best spatial effect, we need at least as many loudspeakers as we have B-format channels, preferably a few more.
Number of Ambisonics encoded channels = (order + 1)²
Number of loudspeakers >= Number of channels
Higher order Ambisonics can give better localization of sound source at an expense of additional channels. 2nd order and 3rd order Ambisonics would have 9 and 16 encoded channels respectively. One would need more number of loudspeakers to exploit the advantages of higher order.
Ambisonics decoder can decode the B-format signals to any loudspeaker setup and even binaural in case of headphones, thus making the process of encoding oblivious to loudspeaker setup. This is contrary to other surround sound standards whose channels contain loudspeaker signals (separate channels for loudspeakers placed at the front, back, etc.). Thus, Ambisonics can co-exist with existing mono, stereo and 5.1 setup.
Figure 4: Ambisonics channels compatibility with existing audio rendering systemsAmbisonics can also be used for post-production mixes. Each sound can be encoded coming from different directions. Also, sound sources can be panned across loudspeakers to give a feeling of moving sound source using Vector Distance Panning or Vector Based Amplitude Panning techniques.
Summing up the advantages of Ambisonics –
• Encoding process can be oblivious to loudspeaker setup at a decoder.
• B-format includes height information making Ambisonics full 360-degree surround sound standard. Periphony arrangement needs to have a minimum of 6 loudspeakers to perceive height information, although the effect is impressive with 8 loudspeakers.
• Loudspeakers can be placed almost anywhere, not required to be arranged in a specific fashion.
• The so-called “sweet spot”, seen in the case of conventional surround sound systems where the listener is required to be seated in a particular spot to get the surround effect, is comparatively bigger in the case of Ambisonics.
• Sounds can appear within the loudspeaker arrangement in the case of Ambisonics, whereas, in other surround sound systems, sounds appear to be coming from the edges of the loudspeaker arrangement.
• B-format can be converted to mono, stereo, 5.1 and binaural processing for headphones. Thus making Ambisonics compatible with any of the existing loudspeaker setup.
PathPartner has ported real-time Ambisonics encoding solution on Qualcomm platform. The algorithm runs on Hexagon DSP as part of the multimedia framework. Our solution is ready to be ported to any platform of interest.
