The methods and apparatus described herein optimally represent full 3D audio mixes (e.g., azimuth, elevation, and depth) as “sound scenes” in which the decoding process facilitates head tracking. Sound scene rendering can be modified for the listener's orientation (e.g., yaw, pitch, roll) and 3D position (e.g., x, y, z). This provides the ability to treat sound scene source positions as 3D positions instead of being restricted to positions relative to the listener. Sound scene rendering can be augmented by encoding depth to a source directly. This provides the ability to modify the transmission format and panning equations to support adding depth indicators during content production. Unlike typical methods that apply depth cues such as loudness and reverberation changes in the mix, this method would enable recovering the distance of a source in the mix so that it can be rendered for the final playback capabilities rather than those on the production side.