Abstract

Mutlizone sound field reproduction aims to generate personal sound zones in a shared space with multiple loudspeakers. Conventionally, loudspeakers are placed to form a regular pattern such as circular, arc or linear array, which are empirical rather than optimal mainly for the convenience of physical placement. Recently, several algorithms have been proposed to select a fixed number of loudspeaker locations from a large set of candidate positions, such as the sparse regularization methods (i.e. Lasso and Elastic Net), the Constrained Match Pursuit method, the Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization method . Most of these methods were investigated for single-zone rather than mulit-zone sound field reproduction based on the pressure matching techniques. This paper compares the performance of the state-of-the-art techniques for loudspeaker position optimization in a multizone sound field reproduction system in terms of reproduction error, acoustic contrast and array effort. Both single tone and broadband sound signals are used and the effect of the distance between the bright and dark zones on the performance of the algorithms are investigated.