Speaker
Description
Immersive live music productions promise three key benefits for audiences: audio‑visual consistency (you hear sound where you see it), improved source separation and intelligibility through spatial unmasking, and new creative possibilities for mixing engineers. Yet it remains unclear how to assess whether a given venue is suitable for this type of production, based on its measurable acoustic characteristics. Using virtual acoustics and binaural auditory models, we analyze how the presence of diffuse reverberation, specified by a Reverberation Time (RT), direct-to-diffuse ratio (DRR) and Initial Time Delay Gap (ITDG) govern three perceptual predictors of Quality of Experience: source‑localization accuracy, localization blur, and binaural advantage. In our simulation results, we observed that the DRR was the primary determinant of all three predictors, while the RT played a secondary role. ITDG primarily reduced localization blur, with minor effects on accuracy and spatial unmasking. Its benefits were most apparent at moderate DRRs. These results help define what makes a venue good or poor for immersive live events from a QoE standpoint and provide actionable criteria to secure the “hear‑what‑you‑see” promise and enhanced spatial unmasking in production.