Audiophobe

Eric Benjamin and I had a paper accepted for AES 153 (NYC, 10/2022), but we decided to withdraw it because between the "Presenting Author's Fee" and online conference registration fees, it would cost over $400 for us to present it. Here's Eric's note to the program committee:  My colleague, Aaron Heller, and I would like to withdraw our contribution to the 153rd AES Convention. Our reasons are multiple but primarily it comes down to cost.   I’ve been contributing articles to AES conventions and to the journal for more than forty years. During that time, I have seen the support provided by AES to the authors dwindle. Twenty years or more ago, convention registration fees were completely waived for authors. In the intervening years, that support has been reduced. For our paper in the Spring 2021 convention, the presenting author’s fee was $139; now a year and half later I have received a bill for $320 to present our current paper. The work discussed in these papers ...

I'm please to announce that "Optimized Decoders for Mixed-Order Ambisonics" by myself, Eric Benjamin and Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, presented at the 150th AES Convention (May 2021), is now available on  arXiv . If you want the version with the AES logo and boilerplate, you can purchase it from  AES E-lib . Here's the abstract: In this paper we discuss the motivation, design, and analysis of ambisonic decoders for systems where the vertical order is less than the horizontal order, known as mixed-order Ambisonic systems. This can be due to the use of microphone arrays that emphasize horizontal spatial resolution or speaker arrays that provide sparser coverage vertically. First, we review Ambisonic reproduction criteria, as defined by Gerzon, and summarize recent results on the relative perceptual importance of the various criteria. Then we show that using full-order decoders with mixed-order program material results in poorer performance than with a properly designed mixed...