Impact of mismatched room acoustic modeling on transaural reproduction with loudspeaker arrays

Abstract

Accurate room acoustic modeling plays an important role for designing a transaural reproduction system. If the room transfer functions used in system design are measured in an acoustic environment that differs from the evaluation environment, the performance will deteriorate. In this paper, we investigate the impact of mismatched room acoustic modeling on the performance of the system in reverberant environments. We model the room acoustic transfer functions with the image source method and incorporate the simulated room impulse response for the design of the loudspeaker array system. Simulation results show that the system performance will not be impacted by existence of reverberation when the transfer functions are matched. Additionally, the study finds that modeling only the early reflections is sufficient for satisfactory transaural reproduction.