Spatial Aliasing Artifacts Produced by Linear and Circular Loudspeaker Arrays used for Wave Field Synthesis

Abstract

Wave field synthesis allows the exact reproduction of sound fields if the requirements of its physical foundation are met. However, the practical realization imposes certain technical constraints. One of these is the application of loudspeaker arrays as an approximation to a spatially continuous source distribution. The effect of a finite spacing of the loudspeakers can be described as spatial sampling artifacts. This contribution derives a description of the spatial sampling process for planar linear and circular arrays, analyzes the sampling artifacts and discusses the conditions for preventing spatial aliasing. It furthermore introduces the reproduced aliasing-to-signal ratio as a measure for the energy of aliasing contributions.