Panoramic recording and reproduction of multichannel audio using a circular microphone array

Multichannel audio reproduction generally suffers from one or both of the following problems: i) the recorded audio has to be artificially manipulated to provide the necessary spatial cues, which reduces the consistency of the reproduced sound field with the actual one, and ii) reproduction is not panoramic, which degrades realism when the listener is not seated in a desired ideal position facing the center channel. A recording method using a circularly symmetric array of differential microphones, and a reproduction method using a corresponding array of loudspeakers is presented in this paper. Design of microphone directivity patterns to achieve a panoramic auditory scene is discussed. Objective results in the form of active intensity diagrams are presented.