The Effect of Loudspeaker Radiation Properties on Acoustic Crosstalk Cancelation Using a Linear Loudspeaker Array

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Acoustic crosstalk cancelation refers to the process of driving a set of loudspeakers such that the produced total sound field illuminates one ear of a listener and cancels out on the other ear. This allows for imposing binaural localization cues on the signals by means of head-related transfer functions and thereby make the listeners localize sound sources from directions where there are no loudspeakers. In [1-3], we proposed a system that uses a linear array of loudspeakers and superdirective beamforming to perform listener-position-adaptive crosstalk cancelation. The original beamformer employed a point-source model for the loudspeakers. We show in this contribution that the actual loudspeaker radiation departs significantly from that of the point source model. We demonstrate that the measured channel separation between left and right ear increases significantly in the frequency range of 1-2 kHz as well as below 700 Hz when the actual loudspeaker radiation properties are accounted for in the beamformer design.