In general, techniques are described for performing a vector-based synthesis with respect to higher order ambisonic coefficients (or, in other words, spherical harmonic coefficients). A device comprising a processor may be configured to perform the techniques. The processor may perform the vector-based synthesis with respect to spherical harmonic coefficients to generate decomposed representations of the plurality of spherical harmonic coefficients and determine distinct and background directional information from the directional information. The processor may then reduce an order of the directional information associated with the background audio objects to generate transformed background directional information, and apply compensation to increase values of the transformed directional information to preserve an overall energy of the sound field.