Comparison of Loudspeaker Placement Methods for Sound Field Reproduction

This paper presents a comparison between several loudspeaker placement methods for sound field reproduction (SFR). The goal of these placement methods is to reduce the SFR error under a power constraint by selecting suitable locations for the loudspeakers. The first method is based on singular value decomposition of the acoustic transfer function (ATF) matrix. Depending on the configuration, an ideal ATF matrix is created and, then, approximated by selecting the appropriate locations for the loudspeakers. Another method is based on the constrained matching pursuit (CMP) algorithm, in which candidate locations of the loudspeakers are selected iteratively to minimize the approximation error of the desired sound field. The third method is based on sparsity-promoting sound field approximation using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator. Loudspeaker placements obtained using these methods are compared against benchmark configuration of uniformly distributed loudspeakers. The comparison indicates that for constrained power, the CMP-based placement has the least reproduction error.