Subband Based Room Impulse Response Reshaping

In order to combat the degraded quality of sounds played in reverberant rooms, the methods of room impulse response equalization are used. New approaches utilize the properties of the human auditory system, such as temporal masking, for a better control of late echoes. There, a prefilter is used to modify the played signal, which renders the echoes inaudible for a given position. In case of spatial mismatch, the procedure fails and may even add additional distortions. In order to mitigate these effects, we propose to equalize subbands of the room impulse response independently. With heavy equalization of the low frequencies and only a little or none in the high frequencies, the mismatch and therefore the degradation can be reduced. The result is a bigger equalized volume where a potential human listener can move freely.