Real-Time Sound Field Transmission System by Using Wave Field Reconstruction Filter and Its Evaluation

Abstract

A new real-time sound field transmission system is presented. To construct this system, a large listening area needs to be reproduced at not less than a constant height. Additionally, the driving signals of the loudspeakers should be obtained only from received signals of microphones. Wave field reconstruction (WFR) filtering for linear arrays of microphones and loudspeakers is considered to be suitable for this kind of system. An experimental system was developed to show the feasibility of real-time sound field transmission using the WFR filter. Experiments to measure the reproduced sound field and a subjective listening test of sound localization were conducted to evaluate the proposed system. Although the reproduced sound field included several artifacts such as spatial aliasing and faster amplitude decay, the experimental results indicated that the proposed system was able to provide sound localization accuracy for virtual sound sources comparable to that for real sound sources in a large listening area.