Spatial Preferences

The Spatial panel governs how Orbit interprets and renders the various spatial-audio elements in an ADM or IAMF file: ambisonic scenes, beds, objects, and the loudness weighting applied to height channels. Most of these settings have a "right" answer for a given workflow — broadcast versus music, IAMF versus ADM, reference monitoring versus QC sweep — and getting them wrong can shift levels by a couple of dB without changing anything else visible on screen, so it's worth knowing what each one does.

Ambisonics

These controls affect how Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA) groups are decoded onto the 7.1.4 speaker layout.

Decode Mode — two approaches. Speaker Matched (Projection) is a direct sampling decoder that matches each speaker to a virtual sample point on the sphere; simple, low-CPU, and predictable. Virtual Source (AllRAD) uses a t-design grid of virtual loudspeakers and decodes via energy-preserving panning; gives a smoother, more uniform energy distribution at the cost of a small amount of localization sharpness. Default is Virtual Source.

AllRAD Weighting — only visible when Decode Mode is set to Virtual Source. Three options: None (no max-rE compensation), Single-Band (broadband max-rE applied across the whole spectrum), and Dual-Band (separate weighting below and above ~700 Hz, more accurate at the cost of slightly more CPU). Default is Dual-Band.

Sphere Colour — a purely visual control that picks the palette used to colour the Ambisonics sphere in the 3D scene. Off uses a flat purple, Theme follows your object theme accent, Heatmap maps energy to a red-yellow gradient, and Viridis uses the perceptually uniform Viridis colormap.

Speaker Matched is a simpler decoder that's quick to reason about; Virtual Source produces a more uniform energy distribution at the cost of a small amount of localization sharpness — pick whichever matches the rest of your monitoring chain.

Beds and objects

How beds (channel-based content) and objects (point sources with positional metadata) hit the 7.1.4 speaker layout.

Bed Routing — two options. Direct routes a bed channel straight to its matching speaker (e.g. an L bed channel goes only to the L speaker); produces a sharp, defined image and matches the source 1:1. VBAP spreads each bed channel over multiple speakers using vector-based panning; smoother but blurs the source. Default is Direct.

Panning Mode — two options for how object positions are panned. VBAP (Vector Base Amplitude Panning) is the classical algorithm; works well in the front but tends to fall back to the front speakers for sources behind the listener. LBAP (Layer-Based Amplitude Panning) splits the speaker array into horizontal layers and pans within each, producing more natural surround and height behaviour. Default is LBAP.

Loudness

Height Weighting — controls how the height channels (Ltf / Rtf / Ltb / Rtb) are weighted when computing integrated loudness.

All Heights +1.5 dB weights all four height channels uniformly at +1.5 dB. BS.1770-4 Strict follows the standard exactly: front heights (Ltf / Rtf) at +0 dB and rear heights (Ltb / Rtb) at +1.5 dB (×1.41). The strict variant is what broadcast deliverables are measured against; the uniform variant is occasionally easier to reason about for music workflows. Default is All Heights +1.5 dB.

WARNING

Changing the Height Weighting mode resets every loudness meter — the integrated-loudness number you've been watching becomes meaningless after the switch and starts accumulating again from zero. If you're partway through a measurement pass, finish it before changing this setting.

IAMF playback

Position Smoothing — toggles a five-tap moving average applied to IAMF object position trajectories. IAMF stores object positions quantized to 1° increments, which produces visible "staircase" steps when an object moves slowly. The smoothing filter hides the staircase at the cost of roughly 40–80 ms of latency on the position data (audio is unaffected). Default is on.

This setting affects only IAMF playback; ADM positions are not quantized and are unaffected.

See also

• Monitoring — selecting between the four monitoring modes.
• Metering — the integrated/momentary/short-term loudness meters that consume the height-weighting setting.