US Patent 9412385 Performing spatial masking with respect to spherical harmonic coefficients

In general, techniques are described by which to perform spatial masking with respect to spherical harmonic coefficients. As one example, an audio encoding device comprising a processor may perform various aspects of the techniques. The processor may be configured to perform spatial analysis based on the spherical harmonic coefficients describing a three-dimensional sound field to identify a spatial masking threshold. The processor may further be configured to render the multi-channel audio data from the plurality of spherical harmonic coefficients, and compress the multi-channel audio data based on the identified spatial masking threshold to generate a bitstream.