Towards Constant-Spread Panning For Multi-Loudspeaker Configurations

Amplitude panning, for example Vector Base Amplitude Panning (VBAP), is one of the most widely used methods to reproduce spatial and object-based audio scenes over loudspeakers. It creates, however, a position-dependent perceived source extent, or spread, which is undesirable in many situations. This paper propose an efficient algorithm to generate image sources with exact constant spread for arbitrary loudspeaker layouts. This algorithm is based on a previously proposed approach using convex optimization, but avoids run-time optimization to achieve a complexity very close to VBAP. In this paper, the algorithm is derived for two-dimensional loudspeaker layouts, but it can be adopted to 3D configurations as well.