Abstract

This paper presents the design of an in-cabin personal audio zone (PAZ) system that enables the driver and one rear-row passenger to listen to different audio programs with acceptable mutual disturbance. The system is designed predicated on a modified acoustic-contrast-control-pressure-matching (ACC-PM) algorithm, which is optimized using the genetic algorithm (GA) to find out the optimum tradeoff between performance indices including the acoustic contrast (AC) and error performance (Err) and the numerical stability of the algorithm. Comparison with the traditional ACC-PM algorithm reveals an increased contrast and improved reproduction quality. In addition, perhaps more importantly, the numerical stability of the optimized algorithm is substantially enhanced, making it possible to involve more loudspeakers into the PAZ system to achieve an even better sound compartmentalization performance.