JAES 2024a

The following audio examples accompany the submission

H. Helmholz, J. Crukley, S. v. Amengual Garí, Z. Ben-Hur, and J. Ahrens, “Perceived Quality of Binaural Rendering From Baffled Microphone Arrays Evaluated Without an Explicit Reference,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vol. 72, no. 10, pp. 691–704, 2024, doi: 10.17743/jaes.2022.0164.

The given binaural renderings provide auralizations for all trials and conditions presented in the perceptual study, according to Table 1 in the manuscript. The auralized acoustic environment (Lab) and the nominal sound source at the sitting height of a typical adult listener (ear) are shown in Fig. 1. The presented conditions comprise array configurations at 2nd, 4th, and 8th spherical harmonics order (SH2, SH4, SH8) from the respective types of spherical microphone array (SMA), equatorial microphone array (EMA), and equatorial non-spherical microphone array (XMA). Each array order and array type combination is presented with equalization (EQon) and without equalization (EQoff). Furthermore, two conditions (SMA with EQoff at SH1 and SH44) are presented as repeated anchors in each trial of the employed multi-stimulus category rating (MuSCR) paradigm.

The binaural rendering involves captured array room impulse responses and a G.R.A.S KEMAR mannequin head with minor modifications according to the manuscript (see Sec. 2.3). Equalization filters for the utilized Sennheiser HD650 headphones were employed during the perceptual study, including phase linearization by individual measurement on the KEMAR mannequin head (see Sec. 3.1). These equalization filters are also applied in the present listening examples, i.e., the reproduced timbre and externalization may be affected when listening with different headphones. The auralized program material is a short excerpt of the anechoic percussion stimulus (drums) looped for real-time convolution in the perceptual study.

All listening examples are precomputed for two static head orientations, 0° (frontal) and 90° (lateral), according to the two nominal source directions in Table 1. Furthermore, we provide a precomputed rendition of a continuous horizontal head rotation (0° to 360°). The conditions were presented to the participants with real-time head tracking during the perceptual study (see Sec. 3.1 and experimental resources).

The given audio examples may sound very quiet. In this case, increase (or maximize) the output level of your headphones. The normalization is required to prevent clipping in the rendered audio signals while preserving the full dynamic range of the measurement data.

SMA trials (2)

EMA trials (2)

XMA trials (2)