High quality low complexity binaural rendering for headphones
Karlheinz Brandenburg, Nils Merten, Thomas Thron, Ulrike Sloma · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023
Playing back immersive audio via headphones has been a research topic for a long time. Although there have been advances, bigger breakthroughs are still missing. The basic idea of binaural rendering systems can be summarized with the following elements: The emission characteristics of the audio source, the transmission path from audio source to listener as well as suitable head related transfer functions. Systems following this basic paradigm range from dummy head stereophony over purely simulation based approaches to current parametric algorithms including the usage of room impulse responses. According to research in audio cognition, it is important to incorporate positional and rotational tracking data of the head close to real time as well as acoustic information about the listening room. Based on the chosen approach, the effort to acquire the measurements, to prepare the rendering or the computational demand of the rendering itself might be high. In this paper, we report on a low complexity rendering system which allows high quality binaural reproduction. A recent listening test and many reviews from listeners have proven, that the perception of the rendered audio signals is equivalent to listening to real audio sources in a room.