Adaptive listening room compensation for spatial audio systems

Various kinds of spatial audio systems have been developed that go beyond the current 5.1 standard. Although the approaches are different, they are capable of delivering acoustic immersion to a large number of listeners simultaneously without restricting their activities by headphones, trackers, or alike. In particular, the sweet spot limitation well known from current consumer market systems is repealed. However, these attractive properties could only be realized in listening rooms without any noticeable reverberation. Otherwise, measures have to be taken for the digital compensation of wall reflections. This contribution presents an adaptive compensation technique which is based on the decomposition of sound fields into plane waves. Various advantages are discussed, e.g. improved multichannel adaptation by decoupling of the compensation filters. Finally, results for a specific spatial reproduction method (wave field synthesis) are presented.