Spatial perception of virtual X-Y recordings

Spatial sound acquisition aims at capturing the sound field such that spatial cues present in the sound scene at the recording side are preserved at the reproduction side. The virtual microphone technique is a spatial recording method that allows for an arbitrary selection of the recording position and orientation. It exploits the parametric information about the sound field estimated using distributed microphone arrays in order to synthesize the virtual microphone signals that sound perceptually similar to the signals that would be recorded using physical microphones located at the same positions. In this paper, the quality of the spatial image in virtual stereo recordings is evaluated through a set of subjective experiments, including dedicated tests for distance and angle perception. The listening test results show that the spatial image captured using virtual microphones is perceptually close to the image recorded with physical microphones positioned analogously.