Ambisonics has been touted as a system-independent technique to reproduce and synthesize arbitrary sound fields. It offers several advantages over other technologies, including the potential for compact recording systems and a scalable encoding scheme that focuses on the spatial features of the sound field while omitting the peculiarities of recording and reproduction systems. To date, however, most research surrounding the reproduction of Ambisonics has relied on the assumption of a fairly regular loudspeaker array where all transducers are equidistant to the listener. Mainstream deployment of Ambisonics requires weaker constraints on the reproduction array. Previously, we have introduced a new approach to decode Ambisonic data for reproduction over arrays with irregular angular spacing between loudspeakers. We now extend our proposal with near-field corrections for each loudspeaker. Unlike previous approaches [J. Daniel, 2003], our proposal considers per-loudspeaker near-field corrections in the decoder design stage; this allows us to precisely reproduce Ambisonic-encoded sound fields over non-spherical arrays. Furthermore, the proper treatment of near-field effects makes it possible to re-create sources exhibiting complex directivity patterns. We evaluated our proposal using a 157-channel, irregular loudspeaker array covering the walls and ceiling of a rectangular room to synthesize directional sound sources encoded using fifth-order Ambisonics.
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