The design of ambisonics decoders for irregular speaker array conforming to subjective perception

An analysis of previously derived Ambisonics decoders shows that the mid-high frequency performance of these decoders has poor agreement with subjective perception, since the optimized decoder coefficients could not well meet the objectives developed by the energy vector, and the polar pattern of speaker feeds is suboptimal. In this paper, new objectives are added to fitness function for the optimal speaker response, and the sum of weighted rations genetic algorithm is applied to search a good set of decoder coefficients to meet all the objectives. The decoder of an example application of ITU-4.0 speaker array exhibits a significant improvement in localization performance at the rear of the listeners. In addition, the binaural evaluation demonstrates that the performance of the proposed decoder better conform to the subjective perception.