Layered coding for compressed sound or sound field representations

This document relates to a method for layering a compressed sound representation of a sound or a sound field. The compressed sound representation includes a basic compressed sound representation comprising a plurality of components, basic side information for decoding the basic compressed sound representation into a basic reconstructed sound representation of the sound or sound field, and sideways information. reinforcement comprising parameters to improve the reconstruction of basic sound representation. The method includes subdividing the plurality of components into a plurality of component groups and assigning each of the groups to a respective one of a plurality of hierarchical layers, the number of groups corresponding to the number of layers and the plurality. . Layers comprising a base layer and one or more hierarchical enhancement layers, adding the base side information to the base layer and determining a plurality of enhancement side information portions from the enhancement side information and assigning each of the plurality of enhancement side information portions to a respective one of the plurality of layers, wherein each part of the enhancement side information includes parameters for enhancing a reconstructed sound representation obtainable from data included in the respective layer and any layer below the respective layer. The document further relates to a method of decoding a compressed sound representation of a sound or a sound field, wherein the compressed sound representation is encoded in a plurality of hierarchical layers comprising a base layer and one or more layers. hierarchical enhancement, as well as an encoder and decoder for layered encoding of a compressed sound representation.