A spherical microphone array based system for immersive audio scene rendering

For many applications it is necessary to capture an acoustic field and present it for human listeners, creating the same acoustic perception for them as if they were actually present in the scene. Possible applications of this technique include entertainment, education, military training, remote telepresence, surveillance, and others. Recently, there is much interest on the use of spherical microphone arrays in acoustic scene capture and reproduction application. We describe a 32-microphone spherical array based system implemented for spatial audio capture and reproduction. The array embeds hardware that is traditionally external, such as preamplifiers, filters, digital-to-analog converters, and USB interface adapter, resulting in a portable lightweight solution and requiring no hardware on PC side whatsoever other than a high-speed USB port. We provide capability analysis of the array and describe software suite developed for the application.