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Ambisonics Limitations

Ambisonics represents spatial audio coming towards the listener. Therefore, it cannot properly represent objects that are within a scene. This makes navigation and movement around said objects difficult. Sound events always seem to emanate from beyond.

This has two significant consequences on ambisonic behavior within Wwise:

  • If you set an Attenuation curve, the whole sound field diminishes in volume when you move away from the position of the associated game object. This might complicate things when trying to get in and out of the sound field.
  • If you move to one side of the sound field, sources pointing in this direction will not sound louder than the sources pointing in the opposite direction.

Ambisonics Compared to VBAP

The default panning algorithm of 3D sounds implemented in Wwise is based on the ubiquitous VBAP algorithm, which maximizes sound accuracy with constant overall energy. However, this also minimizes the variability of the energy spread. That is, the energy spread is minimal when the virtual source is aligned with a loudspeaker, and is maximal when it is exactly in the middle of a loudspeaker arc (for standard configurations) or triangle (for configurations with height channels).

In contrast, ambisonics has a constant energy spread regardless of the source direction and loudspeaker layout. The lower the ambisonic order, the greater the spread. First-order ambisonics are, therefore, very imprecise; while third-order ambisonics are relatively precise, although still imprecise compared with VBAP.

Encoding of mono sources into an ambisonics bed may be used for aesthetic reasons.

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