Constraint Optimized Multichannel Mixer-limiter Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel coupled multichannel mixer-limiter design formulated as a linear-constrained quadratic program, reducing distortion and enabling efficient real-time audio processing.

Contribution

It presents a new coupled design approach with optimization techniques that improve distortion performance and computational efficiency over traditional decoupled methods.

Findings

Distortion is reduced with the coupled design.

The method enables real-time processing with computational trade-offs.

Novel optimization techniques improve efficiency and performance.

Abstract

Multichannel audio mixer and limiter designs are conventionally decoupled for content reproduction over loudspeaker arrays due to high computational complexity and run-time costs. We propose a coupled mixer-limiter-envelope design formulated as an efficient linear-constrained quadratic program that minimizes a distortion objective over multichannel gain variables subject to sample mixture constraints. Novel methods for asymmetric constant overlap-add window optimization, objective function approximation, variable and constraint reduction are presented. Experiments demonstrate distortion reduction of the coupled design, and computational trade-offs required for efficient real-time processing.