The Audio Engineering Society announced the recent publication of the AES69-2015 standard, which provides an important framework for the growing binaural and 3D personal audio industries. Binaural listening is growing due to increased usage of smartphones, tablets, and other individual entertainment systems that primarily present audio using headphones. An understanding of the way that the listener experiences binaural sound, expressed as head-related transfer functions (HRTF), opens the way to 3D personal audio. The lack of a standard for the exchange of HRTF data makes it difficult for developers to exchange binaural capture and rendering algorithms effectively. While 3D audio continues to gain popularity among end-users, binaural listening could be the very first 3D audio vector with sufficient fidelity of HRTF. The new AES69-2015 standard defines a file format to exchange space-related acoustic data in various forms. These include HRTF, as well as directional room impulse responses (DRIR). The format is designed to be scalable to match the available rendering process and is designed to be sufficiently flexible to include source materials from different databases.
Learn more at www.aes.org/standards.
