Perceptual Evaluation of Focused Sources in Wave Field Synthesis

Wave Field Synthesis provides the possibility to reproduce virtual sound sources located between the loudspeaker array and the listener. Such sources are known as focused sources. A previously published study including an informal listening test has shown that the reproduction of focused sources is subject to audible artifacts, especially for large loudspeaker arrays. The combination of the time-reversal nature of focused sources and spatial sampling leads to pre-echos. The perception of these artifacts is quite different depending on the relative listener position. This paper describes a formal test which was conducted to verify the perceptual relevance of the physical properties found in previous papers.