METHOD FOR PROCESSING AN AUDIO SIGNAL IN ACCORDANCE WITH A ROOM IMPULSE RESPONSE, SIGNAL PROCESSING UNIT, AUDIO ENCODER, AUDIO DECODER, AND BINAURAL RENDERER

A method for processing an audio signal (400) in accordance with a room impulse response is described. The method includes separately processing the audio signal (400) with an early part and a late reverberation of the room impulse response, wherein the separate processing includes processing the audio signal (400) with the early part of the room impulse response during a first (422) process, processing the audio signal (400) with the late reverberation of the room impulse response or with the synthetic reverberation during a second process (424) that is different and separate from the first process (422), and changing from the first process (422) to the second process (424) at a transition from the early part to the late reverberation in the room impulse response. The method further includes combining (432) the audio signal (428) processed with the early part of the room impulse response and the audio signal (430) processed with the late reverberation of the room impulse response or with the synthetic reverberation. The transition from the early part to the late reverberation in the room impulse response is a time when a correlation measure reaches a threshold. The correlation measure describes with regard to the room impulse response a similarity of a decay in acoustic energy comprising an initial state and of the decay in acoustic energy starting at a point in time, said point in time following the initial state over a predefined frequency range. The threshold is set dependent on the correlation measure for said point in time, said point in time being a time of a selected one of the early reflections in the early part (301, 302) of the room impulse response, and the selected one of the early reflections is the first reflection.