ABSTRACT
Immersive and spatial sound reproduction has been widely studied using loudspeaker arrays. However, flat-panel loudspeakers that utilize thin flat panels with force actuators are a promising alternative to traditional coaxial loudspeakers for practical applications, with benefits in low-visual profiles and diffuse radiation. Literature has addressed the sound quality and applications of flat-panel loudspeakers in three-dimensional sound reproduction, such as wave field synthesis and sound zones. This paper revisits the spatial sound perception of flat-panel loudspeakers, specifically the localization mismatch between the perceived and desired sound directions when using amplitude panning. Subjective tests in an anechoic chamber with 24 subjects result in the mean azimuth direction mismatch within ±6.0° and the mean elevation mismatch within ±10.0°. The experimental results show that the virtual source created by amplitude panning over a flat-panel loudspeaker still achieves spatial localization accuracy close to that of a real sound source, despite not using complex algorithms or acoustic transfer function information. The findings of this study establish a benchmark for virtual source localization in spatial sound reproduction using flat-panel loudspeakers, which can serve as a starting point for future research and optimization of algorithms.
ABSTRACT
This letter introduces a database of Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) measured in seven different rooms for multizone sound field reproduction research in various acoustic environments. A circular array of 60 loudspeakers was installed in each room, with two microphone arrays placed sequentially in five different zones inside the loudspeaker array. A total of 260 400 RIRs were measured to establish the database. As a demonstration application of the database for multizone sound field reproduction, simulations were performed on the pressure matching and acoustic contrast control methods to investigate how a system optimized with the RIRs measured in one room would perform in other rooms.
Subject(s)
Models, Theoretical , Sound , Motion , Computer Simulation , Acoustics , ReproductionABSTRACT
Transfer functions relating sound source strengths and the sound pressure at field points are important for sound field control. Recently, two modal domain methods for transfer function estimation have been compared using numerical simulations. One is the spatial harmonic decomposition (SHD) method, which models a sound field with a series of cylindrical waves; while the other is the singular value decomposition (SVD) method, which uses prior sound source location information to build an acoustic model and obtain basis functions for sound field modelling. In this paper, the feasibility of the SVD method using limited measurements to estimate transfer functions over densely spaced field samples within a target region is demonstrated experimentally. Experimental results with various microphone placements and system configurations are reported to demonstrate the geometric flexibility of the SVD method compared to the SHD method. It is shown that the SVD method can estimate broadband transfer functions up to 3099 Hz for a target region with a radius of 0.083 m using three microphones, and allow flexibility in system geometry. Furthermore, an application example of acoustic contrast control is presented, showing that the proposed method is a promising approach to facilitating broadband sound zone control with limited microphones.
ABSTRACT
Personal audio provides private and personalized listening experiences by generating sound zones in a shared space with minimal interference between zones. One challenge of the design is to achieve the best performance with a limited number of microphones and loudspeakers. In this paper, two modal domain methods for personal audio reproduction are compared. One is the spatial harmonic decomposition (SHD) based method and the other is the singular value decomposition (SVD) based method. It is demonstrated that the SVD based method provides a more efficient modal domain decomposition than the SHD method for 2.5 dimensional personal audio design. Simulation results show that the SVD based method outperforms the SHD one by up to 10 dB in terms of acoustic contrast and up to 17 dB in terms of reproduction error for a compact arc array with five loudspeakers, while requiring fewer microphones around the zone boundaries. The SVD based method retains the inherent efficiency of optimizing in a modal domain while avoiding the inherent geometric limitations of using SHD basis functions. Thus, this approach is advantageous for applications with flexible system geometries and a small number of loudspeakers and microphones.
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a three-dimensional wave-domain acoustic contrast control method to reproduce a multizone sound field using a circular loudspeaker array. In this method, sound field analysis is based on spherical harmonic decomposition, and the loudspeaker weights are obtained by maximizing the acoustic energy contrast between the predefined bright zone and dark zone. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides good multizone separation performance over a large spatial region and requires lower-order spherical harmonics, resulting in a much lower number of microphones required to measure the acoustic transfer functions.
ABSTRACT
This paper addresses a two-dimensional multizone sound field reproduction approach using a wave-domain method. The desired sound fields in the bright and dark zones are described as orthogonal expansions of basis functions over the regions. The loudspeaker weights are obtained by maximizing the contrast among multiple zones in the wave domain. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with the conventional acoustic contrast control approach, the proposed method improves the level of acoustic contrast and array gain over the entire control region and is less sensitive to the selection of the regularization parameter.
ABSTRACT
Pressure matching (PM) and planarity control (PC) methods can be used to reproduce local sound with a certain orientation at the listening zone, while suppressing the sound energy at the quiet zone. In this letter, regularized PM and PC, incorporating coarse error estimation, are introduced to increase the robustness in non-ideal reproduction scenarios. Facilitated by this, the interaction between regularization, robustness, (tuned) personal audio optimization, and local directional performance is explored. Simulations show that under certain conditions, PC and weighted PM achieve comparable performance, while PC is more robust to a poorly selected regularization parameter.
