HOA Recording Corpus
Seven-year Higher-Order Ambisonics recording corpus with microphone array comparison study.
A corpus of Higher-Order Ambisonics recordings spanning seven years of field sessions across the Tricity region and beyond — including concert halls, churches, outdoor urban and natural environments, and a VR film cave set. Captured using spherical microphone arrays up to 5th order (Zylia ZM-1, Harpex Spcmic, RODE NT-SF1), the corpus provides a systematic resource for spatial audio codec evaluation, microphone array benchmarking, and perceptual research.
A subset of recordings was contributed by students and musicians of the Academy of Music in Gdańsk through the ongoing AMuz–Gdańsk Tech collaboration. The corpus includes a dedicated microphone comparison session with parallel recordings from three arrays in identical acoustic conditions. Dataset published on Bridge of Data, Gdańsk Tech. Companion paper submitted to Archives of Acoustics (2026).
Microphone array comparison — AES 160th Convention, Copenhagen (2026). Paper: Zylia ZM-1 vs. Harpex Spcmic: A Case Study of Higher-Order Ambisonic Recording Performance (with Zaporowski). A controlled comparison recorded simultaneously in Aula Politechniki Gdańskiej (370 seats, RT60 = 1.97 s) reveals that despite both arrays nominally producing 3rd-order Ambisonics, the ZM-1 exhibits 27.4 dB energy attenuation from 0th to 3rd order, while the Harpex Spcmic shows only 8.4 dB — a ~19 dB gap that persists across repertoire and is not driven by aliasing-band content. Nominal Ambisonics order alone does not predict per-order energy distribution in real recordings. Accepted with strong accept from both reviewers. Recordings openly available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Reproducible analysis pipeline: PG GitLab.
This research was supported by IDUB Argentum grant no. 20/1/2023/IDUB/I3b/Ag, Gdańsk University of Technology.