Applying the Ambisonics Approach on Planar and Linear Arrays of Loudspeakers

Near-field compensated higher order Ambisonics (HOA) is an approach to the physical synthesis of sound fields. The typical interpretation of the modern HOA approach is that the sound field to be synthesized and the spatio-temporal transfer function of the employed loudspeakers are expanded into series of spherical harmonics in order to determine the loudspeaker driving signals for spherical arrays. Going one level higher in abstraction, HOA can be interpreted as the single-layer potential solution to the problem which is solved via a formulation of the reproduction equation in a spatial frequency domain which is selected according to the geometry of the loudspeaker array. For spherical arrays, this spatial frequency domain is the spherical harmonics domain. The presented paper provides an overview over a recent extension of this approach to the employment of planar and linear loudspeaker arrays. In this latter situation, the solution is obtain via a formulation of the reproduction equation in wavenumber domain.