The development and improvement of 3-D immersive audio is gaining momentum through the growing interest in virtual reality. Possible applications reach from recreating real world environments to immersive concerts and performances to exploiting big data acoustically. To improve the immersive experience several measures can be taken. The recording of the sound field, the spatialization and the development of the loudspeaker arrays are some of the greatest challenges. In this thesis, these challenges for improving immersive audio will be explored. First, there will be a short introduction about 3D audio and a review about the state of the art technology and research. Next, the thesis will provide an introduction to 3D loudspeaker arrays and describe the systems used during this research. Furthermore, the development of a new 16-element 3rd order sound field microphone will be described. Afterwards, different spatial audio algorithms such as higher order ambisonics, wave field synthesis and vector based amplitude panning will be described, analyzed and compared. For each spatialization algorithm, the quality of soundfield reproduction will be quantified using listener perception tests for clarity and sound source localization. / Master of Science

<div>Near-Field Acoustical Holography (NAH) is an inverse process in which sound pressure measurements made in the near-field of an unknown sound source can be used to reconstruct the sound field so that source locations can be identified. Usually a large number of measurements is required for the usual NAH methods since a large number of parameters in the source or field model need to be determined. However, a large-scale microphone measurement is costly and hard to perform, so the use of NAH is limited by practical experimental conditions. In the present work, with the motivation of decreasing the number of microphone measurements required, and thus facilitating the measurement process, two sparse Equivalent Source Method (ESM) algorithms were studied: i.e., Wideband Acoustical Holography (WBH) and l_1-norm minimization. Based on these two algorithms, a new hybrid NAH procedure was proposed and demonstrated.To study and verify the above mentioned algorithms, simulations of different sources were conducted and then experiments were conducted on different sources: i.e., a loudspeaker cabinet and a diesel engine.</div>