Higher Order Ambisonics denoted HOA is a mathematical description of a two- or three-dimensional sound field. The sound field may be captured by a microphone array, designed from synthetic sound sources, or it is a combination of both. HOA can be used as a transport format for two- or three-dimensional surround sound. In contrast to loudspeaker-based surround sound representations, an advantage of HOA is the reproduction of the sound field on different loudspeaker arrangements. Therefore, HOA is suited for a universal audio format.
The spatial resolution of HOA is determined by the HOA order. This order defines the number of HOA signals that are describing the sound field. There are two representations for HOA, which are called the spatial domain and the coefficient domain, respectively. In most cases HOA is originally represented in the coefficient domain, and such representation can be converted to the spatial domain by a matrix multiplication (or transform) as described in EP 2469742 A2. The spatial domain consists of the same number of signals as the coefficient domain. However, in spatial domain each signal is related to a direction, where the directions are uniformly distributed on the unit sphere. This facilitates analysing of the spatial distribution of the HOA representation. Coefficient domain representations as well as spatial domain representations are time domain representations.