# Ambisonics Encoding For Arbitrary Microphone Arrays Incorporating Residual Channels For Binaural Reproduction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17362/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [PhaseCoder: Microphone Geometry-Agnostic Spatial Audio Understanding for Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21124/) (2026)
- [SoundSculpt: Direction and Semantics Driven Ambisonic Target Sound Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00273/) (2025)
- [Generative Learning for Ambisonic Upscaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23479/) (2026)
- [SEA-LM: Egocentric Spatial Audio Understanding for Wearable Microphone Arrays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the rapidly evolving fields of virtual and augmented reality, accurate spatial audio capture and reproduction are essential. For these applications, Ambisonics has emerged as a standard format. However, existing methods for encoding Ambisonics signals from arbitrary microphone arrays face challenges, such as errors due to the irregular array configurations and limited spatial resolution resulting from a typically small number of microphones. To address these limitations and challenges, a mathematical framework for studying Ambisonics encoding is presented, highlighting the importance of incorporating the full steering function, and providing a novel measure for predicting the accuracy of encoding each Ambisonics channel from the steering functions alone. Furthermore, novel residual channels are formulated supplementing the Ambisonics channels. A simulation study for several array configurations demonstrates a reduction in binaural error for this approach.