Patent ID: 8712058

Claim:
A method for decoding a signal, comprising: receiving an arbitrary down-mix signal and spatial information, wherein the spatial information includes compensation information necessary for compensating for the arbitrary down-mix signal, arbitrary down-mix identification information indicating whether the compensation information is included in the spatial information, channel level difference information describing level differences between two channels of a multi-channel signal, and inter channel correlation information describing an amount of correlation between two channels of the multi-channel signal; compensating the arbitrary down-mix signal to ensure that a level of the arbitrary down-mix signal is same as a level of a down-mix signal obtained when the spatial information was estimated on an encoding apparatus using the compensation information; and generating a three-dimensional (3D) down-mix signal by performing a 3D rendering operation on the compensated arbitrary down-mix signal, wherein the 3D rendering operation is performed using a head related transfer function (HRTF), wherein the 3D down-mix signal is a stereo down-mix signal with 3D effect, and wherein the compensation information comprises information regarding a difference between the down-mix signal generated by the encoding apparatus and the arbitrary down-mix signal generated by another encoding apparatus.