  Non-interactive and linear experiences like cinema film offer high quality
surround sound audio to enhance immersion, however the listener's experience is
usually fixed to a single acoustic perspective. With the rise of virtual
reality, there is a demand for recording and recreating real-world experiences
in a way that allows for the user to interact and move within the reproduction.
Conventional sound field translation techniques take a recording and expand it
into an equivalent environment of virtual sources. However, the finite sampling
of a commercial higher order microphone produces an acoustic sweet-spot in the
virtual reproduction. As a result, the technique remains to restrict the
listener's navigable region. In this paper, we propose a method for listener
translation in an acoustic reproduction that incorporates a mixture of
near-field and far-field sources in a sparsely expanded virtual environment. We
perceptually validate the method through a Multiple Stimulus with Hidden
Reference and Anchor (MUSHRA) experiment. Compared to the planewave benchmark,
the proposed method offers both improved source localizability and robustness
to spectral distortions at translated positions. A cross-examination with
numerical simulations demonstrated that the sparse expansion relaxes the
inherent sweet-spot constraint, leading to the improved localizability for
sparse environments. Additionally, the proposed method is seen to better
reproduce the intensity and binaural room impulse response spectra of
near-field environments, further supporting the strong perceptual results.
