AES Fall Online Convention

Ambisonic recording with spherical microphone arrays (SMAs) is based on a far-field assumption which determines how microphone signals are encoded into Ambisonic signals. In the presence of a near-field source, low-frequency distance-dependent boosts arise in SMAs in similar nature to proximity effects in far-field equalized directional microphones. In this study, the effects of near-field sources on Ambisonic signals are modelled analytically, their interaction with regularization stages is observed, and then traced further across to two basic ambisonic processing operations: virtual microphones, and binaural decoding.