Eliciting the Effectiveness of Binaural Renderer Enhancement on the Horizontal Plane

Treanor G, Ranade S, Jot JM, Harel D, Roginska A. Eliciting the Effectiveness of Binaural Renderer Enhancement on the Horizontal Plane. In: AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games. Audio Engineering Society; 2026.pp. 10328:1-10. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23290

@inproceedings{Treanor2026_23290,
  author = {Treanor, Garrett and Ranade, Shaunak and Jot, Jean-Marc and Harel, Daphna and Roginska, Agnieszka},
  title = {{Eliciting the Effectiveness of Binaural Renderer Enhancement on the Horizontal Plane}},
  booktitle = {AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games},
  pages = {10328:1-10},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23290}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Eliciting the Effectiveness of Binaural Renderer Enhancement on the Horizontal Plane
AU  - Treanor, Garrett
AU  - Ranade, Shaunak
AU  - Jot, Jean-Marc
AU  - Harel, Daphna
AU  - Roginska, Agnieszka
T2  - AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
M1  - Paper 10328
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23290
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Binaural rendering is central to spatial audio reproduction via headphones and wearable devices, yet systematic evaluation of enhancement techniques remains methodologically inconsistent across the literature. This paper presents and applies a subjective evaluation methodology designed to consistently elicit five perceptual attributes of headphone-based spatial audio: externalization, horizontal elevation fidelity, front/back distinction, room tone, and spectral coloration. The methodology combines absolute judgment and relative comparison protocols, taking advantage of their complementary capabilities to capture both the absolute perceptual quality of individual rendering conditions, and the salience of perceived differences between them. It is applied in a controlled experiment comparing conventional HRTF-based binaural rendering against two enhancement variants that each superpose a masked spatially diffuse sound field component into the binaural output. Stimuli were spatialized across eleven azimuthal positions in the horizontal plane using a generic dummy-head dataset, and presented over closed-back headphones to participants. The results validate the proposed methodology as a tool for revealing perceptually relevant differences among binaural rendering conditions. Relative comparison tests reveal additional performance difference details between rendering methods. Both enhancement methods significantly improve externalization and front/back distinction relative to unenhanced binaural rendering, with the largest gains at lateral azimuths, and without a statistically significant increase in perceived spectral coloration beyond the baseline effect of HRTF filtering. However, the results do not indicate conclusively whether the binaural rendering methods examined here exhibit or mitigate a "spurious elevation" artifact associated with frontal sound presentation.
ER  -