We have developed a spherical loudspeaker consisting of multiple transducers embedded in a compact spherical enclosure, which aims to recreate sound quality equal to the original in the near-field by presenting 3D audio information with the loudspeaker. The radiation characteristics of violin and guitar sound reproduced by the loudspeaker were compared with those played by musicians in order to acoustically evaluate the loudspeaker system. The characteristics were quantified by applying vector operation to sound pressure values measured around the player and loudspeaker. At 50 cm from center of the loudspeaker, its sound pressure distributions were similar to those from the original violin's sound above 1.5 kHz. The spherical loudspeaker also effectively simulated temporal aspects of radiation characteristics of original musical instruments' sound. Moreover, this loudspeaker was far superior to a one-box loudspeaker in terms of reproducibility of the radiation characteristics of original instruments' sound. Copyright © 2010 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.