Method and device for applying dynamic range compression to a higher order ambisonics signal

An apparatus for dynamic range compression (DRC), the apparatus comprising:

• a receiver for receiving a reconstructed Higher Order Ambisonics (HOA) audio signal representation;
• an audio decoder configured to:
• transform the reconstructed HOA audio signal into a spatial domain based on:
• WDSHT=DDSHTC, wherein DDSHT is an inverse Discrete Spherical Harmonics Transform (DSHT) matrix, wherein C is a block of τHOA samples, and wherein W is a block of spatial samples matching an input time granularity of a Quadrature Mirror Filter (QMF) bank;
• apply a DRC gain value g(n, m) corresponding to a time frequency tile (n, m) based on:
• {hacek over (w)}DRC(n, m)=diag (g(n, m))ŵDSHT (n, m), wherein ŵDSHT (n, m) is a vector of spatial channels for the time frequency tile (n, m);
• and
• rendering to loudspeaker channels based on
• w(n, m)=D DDSHT−1 {hacek over (w)}DRC(n, m), wherein DDSHT−1 matrix is an inverse of the DDSHT matrix and D is a HOA rendering matrix,
• wherein the DDSHT−1 and the DDSHT matrices are optimized for DRC purposes.