It's possible to calculate HRTF coefficients for full third-order ambisonics
now, but it's still not possible to use them here without upmixing first-order
content.
This adds the ability to directly decode B-Format with HRTF, though only first-
order (WXYZ) for now. Second- and third-order would be easilly doable, however
we'd need to be able to up-mix first-order content (from the BFORMAT2D and
BFORMAT3D buffer formats) since it would be inappropriate to decode lower-order
content with a higher-order decoder.
The sound localization with virtual channel mixing was just too poor, so while
it's more costly to do per-source HRTF mixing, it's unavoidable if you want
good localization.
This is only partially reverted because having the virtual channel is still
beneficial, particularly with B-Format rendering and effect mixing which
otherwise skip HRTF processing. As before, the number of virtual channels can
potentially be customized, specifying more or less channels depending on the
system's needs.
This new method mixes sources normally into a 14-channel buffer with the
channels placed all around the listener. HRTF is then applied to the channels
given their positions and written to a 2-channel buffer, which gets written out
to the device.
This method has the benefit that HRTF processing becomes more scalable. The
costly HRTF filters are applied to the 14-channel buffer after the mix is done,
turning it into a post-process with a fixed overhead. Mixing sources is done
with normal non-HRTF methods, so increasing the number of playing sources only
incurs normal mixing costs.
Another benefit is that it improves B-Format playback since the soundfield gets
mixed into speakers covering all three dimensions, which then get filtered
based on their locations.
The main downside to this is that the spatial resolution of the HRTF dataset
does not play a big role anymore. However, the hope is that with ambisonics-
based panning, the perceptual position of panned sounds will still be good. It
is also an option to increase the number of virtual channels for systems that
can handle it, or maybe even decrease it for weaker systems.
At 0 distance from the listener, the sound is omni-directional. As the source
and listener become 'radius' units apart, the sound becomes more directional.
With HRTF, an omni-directional sound is handled using 0-delay, pass-through
filter coefficients, which is blended with the real delay and coefficients as
needed to become more directional.
