#35 Spatial Audio Object Coding with Enhanced Audio Object Separation

Spatial sound reproduction on a multi-channel loudspeaker setup indicate a consistent trend in today’s audio playback systems. Digital surround sound significantly improves the realism of the spatial sound experience, but also results in a drastic increase in required audio data rate. Spatial Audio Coding (SAC) technology provides means for efficient storage and transmission of multi-channel signals by a downmix signal and associated parametric side information describing the spatial sound image. More re-cently, SAC has been extended with an object-based concept termed Spatial Audio Object Coding (SAOC) enabling efficient coding and interactive spatial rendering of multiple individual audio objects at the playback side. Due to the underlying para-metric coding approach, object level manipulations may affect the produced perceptual sound scene quality, and using extreme object attenuation or boosting may result in unacceptably de-graded audio quality. The paper describes how regular SAOC processing is ad-vanced to ensure high quality sound reproduction even in de-manding remix applications.