## 1 Introduction  
Sound reproduction systems play an important role in our everyday life. They allow us to listen to recordings from a different place and a past time. Many different methods for the recording and playback of sound exist, utilizing different combinations of microphone and loudspeaker setups. The most common one is a simple stereo reproduction, but there are more complex reproduction techniques, such as wave field synthesis [1] or ambisonics [2]. Even though the state-of-the-art methods achieve a very good accuracy in reproducing sound fields, they do not consider the interaction between the acoustics of the recording and playback environment. In particular, extra reverberation is created by the playback environment, and in addition, there is no control over the spatial distribution of the reverberant sound field, which may influence the apparent source width and perceived listener envelopment. For this reason, ongoing investigations aim to improve the performance of these methods. In particular, [PERSON] and [PERSON] proposed a new way of recording and playing back sound fields [3]. The main idea behind their research was to record the direct and reverberant sound field separately in order to be able to render it in a playback room while optimizing certain perceptually-motivated criteria for the authentic audio reproduction. These criteria aim for recreating the reverberant sound field in the playback environment as faithfully as possible by optimizing the amount and spectral shape of the reverberation, as well as the interaural cross-correlation created by the reproduced reverberant sound field, such as it is created in the reproduction room, including its added reverberant effect. In their paper, [PERSON] and [PERSON] assumed that optimizing these perceptual criteria is sufficient for an authentic reproduction of the sound field present in the recording room,which is created by a single source. This claim was supported by subjective evaluations. The playback and recording configuration can be seen in Figure 1. In addition to the two basic stereo loudspeakers, the proposed approach used two dipole loudspeakers to excite and equalize the reverberant sound field. For the optimized rendering, the system relies on the presence of a relatively dry direct signal to be rendered on the frontal loudspeakers and a reverberant signal to be optimized and rendered on the dipole loudspeakers. To record the direct sound, a microphone \((C)\) was positioned close to the sound source. This also avoided early reflections, which could cause a change in coloration [4; 5]. For recording the reverberant sound field, two microphones \((B^{l},B^{r})\) were placed at two distant positions in the diffuse field. Since the method of [PERSON] and [PERSON] [3] until now is limited to a single source and only records the direct sound field with one microphone, an extension is needed to also represent the spatial distribution of sources within the direct sound field signals as perceived at the listener position. Although this could in principle be achieved by using multiple close microphones and an appropriate mixing scheme, in this contribution, we want to provide a method with only a single 'true-stereo' microphone setup that is placed at the intended listener position within the recording room. Particular attention has to be paid to reduce the reverberant sound field in the direct sound field signals to be able to separately optimize the rendering of the direct and reverberant sound fields according to perceptual criteria within the playback room [3]. Although the specific design criteria for the proposed microphone array are envisioned to be used in the audio reproduction system of Grosse and van de Par [3], it can also be considered to use the proposed microphone array to record a relatively dry spatial image of the sound sources on stage to be combined with a reverberant track that can be mixed at a level that the recording engineer deems suitable.