A method for acoustic scene playback is described, which comprises: providing recording data comprising microphone signals of microphone setups positioned within an acoustic scene and microphone metadata of the microphone setups, each of the microphone setups has a recording spot which is a center position of the respective microphone setup; specifying a virtual listening position within the acoustic scene; assigning each microphone setup Virtual Loudspeaker Objects, VLOs, wherein each VLO is an abstract sound output object within a virtual free field; generating an encoded data stream based on the recording data, the virtual listening position and VLO parameters of the VLOs assigned to the microphone setups; and decoding the encoded data stream based on a playback setup, thereby generating a decoded data stream; and feeding the decoded data stream to a rendering device, thereby driving the rendering device to reproduce sound of the acoustic scene at the virtual listening position.