The ring of silence in Ambisonics: spectral impairments in loudspeaker and binaural reproduction
The ring of silence in Ambisonics: spectral impairments in loudspeaker and binaural reproduction
When a sound field is reproduced by an Ambisonic system with a number of loudspeakers greater than the minimum required by the order of the input Ambisonic signals, a ring shaped region (in 2D) or spherical shell (in 3D) is generated wherein the average sound pressure level is lower than the desired target. This phenomenon, already observed by Solvang in2008, is further analysed in this work and explained in terms of truncation error, spatial aliasing (related to the chosen Ambisonic decoder), and energy of the radial functions. It is then shown that the same phenomenon is the cause of high-frequency energy loss occurring in the binaural reproduction of Ambisonic material when the HRTF is sampled with a high-density grid, as already observed by Bernschütz et al.
Binaural Audio, HRTF, Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA), Spatial Aliasing, Spatial Audio
Fazi, Filippo Maria
e5aefc08-ab45-47c1-ad69-c3f12d07d807
Hollebon, Jacob
fecec634-ce57-4d47-813e-519135cdf7f2
Fazi, Filippo Maria
e5aefc08-ab45-47c1-ad69-c3f12d07d807
Hollebon, Jacob
fecec634-ce57-4d47-813e-519135cdf7f2
Fazi, Filippo Maria and Hollebon, Jacob
(2026)
The ring of silence in Ambisonics: spectral impairments in loudspeaker and binaural reproduction.
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.
(doi:10.1109/TASLPRO.2026.3655624).
Abstract
When a sound field is reproduced by an Ambisonic system with a number of loudspeakers greater than the minimum required by the order of the input Ambisonic signals, a ring shaped region (in 2D) or spherical shell (in 3D) is generated wherein the average sound pressure level is lower than the desired target. This phenomenon, already observed by Solvang in2008, is further analysed in this work and explained in terms of truncation error, spatial aliasing (related to the chosen Ambisonic decoder), and energy of the radial functions. It is then shown that the same phenomenon is the cause of high-frequency energy loss occurring in the binaural reproduction of Ambisonic material when the HRTF is sampled with a high-density grid, as already observed by Bernschütz et al.
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RingOfSilence_IEEE_author_ready
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e-pub ahead of print date: 20 January 2026
Keywords:
Binaural Audio, HRTF, Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA), Spatial Aliasing, Spatial Audio
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 508738
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/508738
ISSN: 2329-9304
PURE UUID: 10ae7f25-56f2-4ab9-9735-17d339b283ba
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Date deposited: 02 Feb 2026 17:58
Last modified: 03 Feb 2026 02:43
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Author:
Jacob Hollebon
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