TY - GEN
T1 - MOVING THE AMBISONICS SWEET-SPOT BY ADAPTING LOUDSPEAKER EQUALIZATION AND AMBISONICS DECODING
AU - Kuntz, Matthieu
AU - Seeber, Bernhard U.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Kuntz & Seeber. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Virtual acoustic environments are becoming a widespread tool in hearing research. Free-field reproduction allows the design of more realistic experiments, where participants can turn their heads and move around without the need for individualized Head-related transfer functions or head tracking. A limitation of commonly used sound field synthesis techniques, in particular Ambisonics, is their decreasing accuracy with increasing distance from the center of the loudspeaker array. While participants can move around in the reproduced sound field, it is not possible to control the sound field they receive at off-center positions to the degree required for hearing research. In this work, we consider a two-dimensional 36-loudspeaker array, where the loudspeakers are typically equalized in the center of the array. We investigate the possibility of moving the Ambisonics sweet-spot by equalizing the loudspeakers at different points inside the loudspeaker array. Simulations show that at least 50% of the sweet-spot size is preserved when moving the equalization point. Adapting the relative loudspeaker positions for the Ambisonics decoding reduces the parallax shift observed in Ambisonics systems.
AB - Virtual acoustic environments are becoming a widespread tool in hearing research. Free-field reproduction allows the design of more realistic experiments, where participants can turn their heads and move around without the need for individualized Head-related transfer functions or head tracking. A limitation of commonly used sound field synthesis techniques, in particular Ambisonics, is their decreasing accuracy with increasing distance from the center of the loudspeaker array. While participants can move around in the reproduced sound field, it is not possible to control the sound field they receive at off-center positions to the degree required for hearing research. In this work, we consider a two-dimensional 36-loudspeaker array, where the loudspeakers are typically equalized in the center of the array. We investigate the possibility of moving the Ambisonics sweet-spot by equalizing the loudspeakers at different points inside the loudspeaker array. Simulations show that at least 50% of the sweet-spot size is preserved when moving the equalization point. Adapting the relative loudspeaker positions for the Ambisonics decoding reduces the parallax shift observed in Ambisonics systems.
KW - Virtual acoustic environment
KW - higher-order Ambisonics
KW - local sound field synthesis
KW - loudspeaker array
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85191249486&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85191249486
T3 - Proceedings of Forum Acusticum
BT - Forum Acusticum 2023 - 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, EAA 2023
PB - European Acoustics Association, EAA
T2 - 10th Convention of the European Acoustics Association, EAA 2023
Y2 - 11 September 2023 through 15 September 2023
ER -