The Difference Between Stereophony and Wave Field Synthesis in the Context of Popular Music

C Hold, H Wierstorf, A Raake, "The Difference Between Stereophony and Wave Field Synthesis in the Context of Popular Music," in 140th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, Paper 9533 (2016). [ link ] [ paper ]

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Hold2016b,
    title     = {The Difference between Stereophony and Wave Field Synthesis in
                 the Context of Popular Music},
    author    = {Hold, Christoph and Wierstorf, Hagen and Raake, Alexander},
    booktitle = {140th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society},
    address   = {Paris, France},
    pages     = {Paper 9533},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2016},
    url       = {http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=18232}
}

Abstract

Stereophony and Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) are capable of providing the listener with a rich spatial audio experience. They both come with different advantages and challenges. Due to different requirements during the music production stage, a meaningful direct comparison of both methods has rarely been carried out in previous research. As stereophony relies on a channel- and WFS on a model-based approach, the same mix cannot be used for both systems. In this study mixes of different popular-music recordings have been generated, each for two-channel stereophony, surround stereophony, and WFS. The focus is on comparability between the reproduction systems in terms of the resulting sound quality. In a paired-comparison test listeners rated their preferred listening experience.

Supplementary Material

The music mixes are provided for download at 10.14279/depositonce-5173. Note, that they are stored in a channel based way, which means that for the WFS mix, you will need a similar WFS system that can distribute the mixed 56-channels on a circle.

If you are interested in the object based mixing for WFS, you might have a look at the ssr_wfs_scenes.zip file which comes with 10.14279/depositonce-5173 which was used with the SoundScape Renderer to create the mix. The signal feeds you need for the single objects in the mix are available at10.5281/zenodo.55718.

The mixes where adjusted to achieve the same loudness level at the center of the listening area. This was done by performing measurements with a dummy head for different levels of the mixes. The dummy head recordings are available at 10.5281/zenodo.55719.