Reliable loudness calculation of audio material is an essential component for professional content production and delivery. While ITU-R BS.1770-4 has become a well-established standard for loudness measurement of channel-based content, it remains unclear how well the loudness of Scene-Base Audio content, i.e., (Higher-Order) Ambisonics, can be estimated with it. This paper presents a listening test to assess the perceived loudness of Scene-Based Audio at different HOA orders and rendered to different loudspeaker layouts using the EBU ADM renderer. The results indicate that perceived loudness is merely a function of the audio material and only slightly differs across loudspeaker configurations and HOA Orders. For comparison, the loudness is also estimated directly from the 0th-order coefficient, and indirectly from the respective loudspeaker feeds in accordance to ITU-R BS.1770-4. It was found that both methods moderately but consistently underestimated the perceived loudness.
https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=22070
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