Velocity controlled sound field reproduction by non-uniformly spaced loudspeakers

One approach to the reproduction of a sound field is to ensure the reproduction of the acoustic pressure on the surface bounding the volume within which reproduction is sought. However, this approach suffers from technical limitations when the loudspeakers used for the reproduction of the surface acoustic pressures are unevenly spaced. It is shown in this paper that sound field reproduction with a spatially non-uniform loudspeaker arrangement can be considerably improved by changing the physical quantity to be controlled on the bounding surface from pressure to particle velocity. One of the main advantages of the velocity control method is the simplicity with which the inverse problem can be regularized, irrespective of the direction of arrival of the sound to be reproduced. In addition, the velocity controlled sound field shows better reproduction of the time averaged intensity flow in the reproduction region which in turn appears to be closely linked with better human perception of sound localization. Furthermore, the proposed method results in smoother “panning functions” that describe the variation of the source outputs as a function of the angle of incidence of the sound to be reproduced. The performance of the velocity matching method has been evaluated by comparison to the conventional pressure matching method and through simulations with several non-uniform loudspeaker layouts. The simulated results were also verified with experiments and subjective tests.