Virtual scene adaption for compensation of the reproduction room

To study the effect of real-life acoustic scenes on human behavior and well-being, a repeatable scene in an acoustically controllable environment must be set up that can be perceived as naturally as possible. As headphone reproduction might distract the user from a natural immersion, loudspeaker-based solutions are considered. These are designed to work perfectly in anechoic rooms and neglect the influence of the reproduction room. A possible solution by substitution of reflections in the target scene with unavoidable reflections occurring in the reproduction room is proposed. Reflections which are close in time and direction of arrival are substituted. As these criteria are less important for the late reverberant part of a room impulse response (RIR) this work focuses on early reflections only. Reflection detection was done using a hybrid model of virtual acoustics and analysis of RIR measurements. As loudspeaker arrays are used according to a specific reproduction technique chosen the algorithm was adapted to three different reproduction techniques: higher order Ambisonics, crosstalk-cancellation and vector-base amplitude panning. For the performance evaluation, a listening test was conducted regarding the perceived width of a virtual source.