Sound Field Reproduction With a Cylindrical Loudspeaker Array Using First Order Wall Reflections

Sound field reproduction is a promising technology for reproducing a desired sound field over a specific area. However, several practical challenges exist, such as the requirement for a large number of loudspeakers and the degradation of spatial reproduction accuracy due to room reflections. This work proposes a sound field reproduction method based on a cylindrical loudspeaker array that is used to both radiate sound directly towards the listener and take advantage of controlled first-order reflections from the room’s walls. The sound field corresponding to one or more virtual sound sources is created by the combination of the direct and reflected sound at the listener position. As long as the lateral walls generate well-defined specular reflections, the simple model of the reverberant field with the proposed formulation enables this method to work without elaborate acoustical measurements. Two approaches with different concepts of controlling the array are compared and their mathematical equivalence is shown. To evaluate the performance, both simulations and experiments were conducted, showing a good agreement with theory.