A Stable Sound Field Control Method for a Personal Audio System

Abstract

A personal audio system has a wide application prospect in people’s lives, which can be implemented by sound field control technology. However, the current sound field control technology is mainly based on sound pressure or its improvement, ignoring another physical property of sound: particle velocity, which is not conducive to the stability of the entire reconstruction system. To address the problem, a sound field method is constructed in this paper, which minimizes the reconstruction error in the bright zone, minimizes the loudspeaker array effort in the reconstruction system, and at the same time controls the particle velocity and sound pressure of the dark zone. Five unevenly placed loudspeakers were used as the initial setup for the computer simulation experiment. Simulation results suggest that the proposed method is better than the PM (pressure matching) and EDPM (eigen decomposition pseudoinverse method) methods in the bright zone in an acoustic contrast index, the ACC (acoustic contrast control) method in a reconstruction error index, and the ACC, PM, and EDPM methods in the bright zone in a loudspeaker array effort index. The average array effort of the proposed method is the smallest, which is about 9.4790, 8.0712, and 4.8176 dB less than that of the ACC method, the PM method in the bright zone, and the EDPM method in the bright zone, respectively, so the proposed method can produce the most stable reconstruction system when the loudspeaker system is not evenly placed. The results of computer experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, and suggest that compared with traditional methods, the proposed method can achieve more balanced results in the three indexes of acoustic contrast, reconstruction error, and loudspeaker array effort on the whole.

Keywords

• personal audio system
• sound field control
• acoustic contrast
• reconstruction error
• array effort