Spatial Preferences

Preferences ▸ Spatial covers how objects pan across your speakers, and how Ambisonics content is decoded to them. Most of these settings have a "right" answer for a given workflow — broadcast versus music, IAMF versus ADM, reference monitoring versus a QC sweep — and the wrong one can shift levels by a couple of dB without changing anything else on screen, so it's worth knowing what each does.

Objects

Panning

How objects are panned onto the speaker layout:

• VBAP — Vector Base: each object between the three speakers around it.
• LBAP — Layer-Based: surrounds for the origin, every height for overhead. The default.

On a rig without clean speaker layers only VBAP is available — LBAP is unavailable for irregular layouts.

Coverage

A live sphere of each speaker's gain as a source sweeps the room, above and below ear level, for the layout you're monitoring (the card is titled with it — Coverage · 5.1). It shows which panning law is actually in effect, not just which is selected.

• Drag the sphere to orbit it.
• Pause stops the sweep, so you can place the source yourself with the Azimuth and Elevation sliders.
• VBAP | LBAP under the sphere compares the two laws without changing the mode above.

IAMF Position Smoothing

Smooth IAMF object trails — a five-tap moving average on IAMF object positions. IAMF's polar encoding quantises elevation to 1° and distance to eight steps, which shows as a staircase when an object moves slowly; smoothing hides it, at the cost of 40–80 ms of delay on the display. The audio isn't affected. On by default; turned off, you see the raw decoded positions.

Ambisonics

How higher-order Ambisonics (HOA) is decoded to your speakers.

Decode

• Speaker Matched — decodes straight to your speakers by projection: a sampling decoder that's simple, light and predictable.
• Virtual Source — decodes through a dense set of virtual sources (AllRAD), then pans them to any layout, for a smoother, more even spread. The default.

AllRAD weighting

Applies to Virtual Source decoding:

• None — pure AllRAD with no spectral compensation: the most diffuse imaging. For reference measurement and EBU conformance checks.
• Single Band — max-rE across the whole spectrum: sharper imaging, with a mild low-frequency comb.
• Dual Band — max-rE above a 380 Hz Linkwitz-Riley crossover: low-frequency timbre kept, imaging sharpened up top. The studio default.

See Ambisonics Decode Modes for more.

Sphere Colour

The palette for the Ambisonics sphere in the 3D scene — purely visual:

• Off — fixed purple; points respond to level by size and opacity only.
• Theme — the Orbit palette, deep purple → lilac → white; loud regions brighten toward white.
• Heatmap — thermal, deep blue → yellow → red; loud regions light up hot.
• Viridis — perceptually uniform, dark purple → teal → yellow; equal steps in energy look equal.

See also

• Monitoring — the monitoring modes.
• Metering — the level-meter scale and theme.
• Loudness — delivery targets and how loudness is measured.