Spatial Audio Renderer

This section provides an overview about the CRAIVE-Lab's multi-channel spatial audio rendering system.

Basic Facts

Properties	Descriptions
Total channel count	136 (128 for WFS, 6 for HoA, 2 for frontal stereo)
Supported rendering techniques	WFS + VBAP + HoA + Stereo
Max spatial aliasing frequency	603 Hz
Max virtual sound source count	256
Network Protocol	Dante + OSC

Speaker Map

Speaker map with their respected indexes in the infrastructure. Purple coordinates are compatible with game engines only.

The speakers in the system represents 4 different kinds of rendering modalities:

• Vector-base amplitude panning (VBAP);

• Wave field synthesis (WFS);

• Higher-order ambisonics (HoA); and

• Stereo.

The correspondence between individual loudspeaker channels and their primary rendering modalities is listed below:

Channels	Primary Rendering Modalities
1-128	VBAP + WFS; certain channels assists in HoA rendering
129-134	HoA (assisted by certain channels in 1-128)
135-136	Stereo

The position and orientations of these loudspeakers affect the way virtual sound sources are rendered with respect to the physical space.

You can find the exact coordinates with respect to the physical center of the room geometry both in this CSV file (to be linked shortly). For speaker coordinates be used in Max/MSP, please visit Max 8 + Spat 5.

Important!

Currently, there is a disagreement regarding the speaker coordinates relative to the orientation of the room. Therefore, in some cases, the opposite sign of speaker coordinates applies. This disagreement is currently being resolved.

For interactive applications such as Unity, please refer to the CRAIVE128 Max patch for the speaker coordinates. For non-interactive applications such as Reaper, the original positions should work fine.

Networked Control via Dante

The Dante Controller is enabled for all speaker channel. To use it, please acquire a Dante Virtual Soundcard license either at your own expense (at a reasonable one-time charge) or by asking us for free floating license.

Here are the steps you should take to set it up:

1. Acquire your license;

2. Install Dante Virtual Soundcard on your computer;

3. Connect your computer to the Ethernet cable;

4. Apply your license to Dante Virtual Soundcard;

5. Ask a researcher to set up the I/O mapping for your application.

Due to the internal limitation of the Dante Controller, currently we can only apply a maximum of 64 speaker channels for spatial audio rendering.