  Ambisonics is a complete theory for spatial audio whose building blocks are
the spherical harmonics. Some of the drawbacks of low order Ambisonics, like
poor source directivity and small sweet-spot, are directly related to the
properties of spherical harmonics. In this thesis we illustrate a novel spatial
audio framework similar in spirit to Ambisonics that replaces the spherical
harmonics by an alternative set of functions with compact support: the
spherical wavelets. We develop a complete audio chain from encoding to
decoding, using discrete spherical wavelets built on a multiresolution mesh. We
show how the wavelet family and the decoding matrices to loudspeakers can be
generated via numerical optimization. In particular, we present a decoding
algorithm optimizing acoustic and psychoacoustic parameters that can generate
decoding matrices to irregular layouts for both Ambisonics and the new wavelet
format. This audio workflow is directly compared with Ambisonics.
