Multizone sound field reproduction with direction-of-arrival-distribution-based regularization and its application to binaural-centered mode-matching

TL;DR

This paper introduces a DoA-distribution-based regularization technique for multizone sound field reproduction, enhancing accuracy and extending to binaural mode-matching to improve spatial fidelity at higher frequencies.

Contribution

It applies DoA-based regularization to multizone sound reproduction and extends it to binaural mode-matching, improving accuracy and spatial consistency.

Findings

Enhanced reproduction accuracy away from the center

Effective suppression of large secondary-source gains

Improved binaural reproduction fidelity

Abstract

In higher-order Ambisonics, a framework for sound field reproduction, secondary-source driving signals are generally obtained by regularized mode matching. The authors have proposed a regularization technique based on direction-of-arrival (DoA) distribution of wavefronts in the primary sound field. Such DoA-distribution-based regularization enables a suppression of excessively large driving signal gains for secondary sources that are in the directions far from the primary source direction. This improves the reproduction accuracy at regions away from the reproduction center. First, this study applies the DoA-distribution-based regularization to a multizone sound field reproduction based on the addition theorem. Furthermore, the regularized multizone sound field reproduction is extended to a binaural-centered mode matching (BCMM), which produces two reproduction points, one at each ear, to avoid a degraded reproduction accuracy due to a shrinking sweet spot at higher frequencies. Free-field and binaural simulations were numerically performed to examine the effectiveness of the DoA-distribution-based regularization on the multizone sound field reproduction and the BCMM.