Stereophonic Personal Audio Reproduction Using Planarity Control Optimization

Sound field control to create multiple personal audio spaces (sound zones) in a shared listening environment is an active research topic. Typically, sound zones in the literature have aimed to reproduce monophonic audio programme material. The planarity control optimization approach can reproduce sound zones with high levels of acoustic contrast, while constraining the energy flux distribution in the target zone to impinge from a certain range of azimuths. Such a constraint has been shown to reduce problematic self-cancellation artefacts such as uneven sound pressure levels and complex phase patterns within the target zone. Furthermore, multichannel reproduction systems have the potential to reproduce spatial audio content at arbitrary listening positions (although most exclusively target a ‘sweet spot’). By designing the planarity control to constrain the impinging energy rather tightly, a sound field approximating a plane-wave can be reproduced for a listener in an arbitrarily-placed target zone. In this study, the application of planarity control for stereo reproduction in the context of a personal audio system was investigated. Four solutions, to provide virtual left and right channels for two audio programmes, were calculated and superposed to achieve the stereo effect in two separate sound zones. The performance was measured in an acoustically treated studio using a 60 channel circular array, and compared against a least-squares pressure matching solution whereby each channel was reproduced as a plane wave field. Results demonstrate that planarity control achieved 6 dB greater mean contrast than the least-squares case over the range 250-2000 Hz. Based on the principal directions of arrival across frequency, planarity control produced azimuthal RMSE of 4.2/4.5 degrees for the left/right channels respectively (leastsquares 2.8/3.6 degrees). Future work should investigate the perceived spatial quality of the implemented system with respect to a reference stereophonic setup.