Speaker
Description
The expansion of immersive audio into multipurpose venues, such as extended reality facilities, music studios, and cinemas, poses a challenge to the reproducibility of spatial audio content. Unlike standardized listening rooms, these environments exhibit unique geometric and acoustic constraints. As a highly transportable and effective method for describing and reproducing sound fields, Higher-Order Ambisonics is often preferred for immersive audio applications. However, multipurpose loudspeaker setups often feature non-uniform speaker distributions and vary in room acoustics. Ambisonic decoders typically do not take the room into account, and standard system calibration relies primarily on single-channel metrics. Consequently, there is a methodological gap in diagnosing and predicting how room acoustics distort spatial audio rendering. This paper is a comparative case study of six diverse venues in Switzerland. First, we compare vector measures based on an All-Round Ambisonic Decoder calculated for the selected loudspeaker layouts. Then, we analyze spatial room impulse responses measured on-site using the Spatial Decomposition Method and demonstrate how early reflections may create spatial distortions. This contribution is a foundational step toward an open-access dataset of multipurpose loudspeaker arrays. These measurements will drive future listening tests to assess the performance of the physical arrays and the reproducibility of spatial reproduction algorithms.