This study investigates listeners’ perceptual responses in audio-visual interactions concerning binaural spatial audio. Audio stimuli are coupled with or without visual cues to the listeners. The subjective test participants are tasked to indicate the direction of the incoming sound while listening to the audio stimulus via loudspeakers or headphones with the head-related transfer function (HRTF) plugin. First, the methodology assumptions and the experimental setup are described to the participants. Then, the results are presented and analysed using statistical methods. The results indicate that the headphone trials showed much higher perceptual ambiguity for the listeners than when the sound is delivered via loudspeakers. The influence of the visual modality dominates the audio-visual evaluation when loudspeaker playback is employed. Moreover, when the visual stimulus is present, the headphone playback pattern of behavior is not always in response to the loudspeaker playback.

In virtual acoustics or artificial reverberation, impulse responses can be split so that direct and reflected components of the sound field are reproduced via separate loudspeakers. The authors had investigated the perceptual effect of angular separation of those components in commonly used 5.0 and 7.0 multichannel systems, with one and three sound sources respectively (Kleczkowski et al., 2015, J. Audio Eng. Soc. 63, 428-443). In that work, each of the front channels of the 7.0 system was fed with only one sound source. In this work a similar experiment is reported, but with phantom sound sources between the front loud- speakers. The perceptual advantage of separation was found to be more consistent than in the condition of discrete sound sources. The results were analysed both for pooled listeners and in three groups, according to experience. The advantage of separation was the highest in the group of experienced listeners.