Transaural reproduction of spatial surround sound using four actual loudspeakers

Recently, multichannel sound has been evolving from horizontal surround to spatial surround with height. On the other hand, in some practical uses such as TV set, it is inconvenient to arrange multiple loudspeakers for multichannel sound reproduction. Transaural technique, which consists of HRTF-based binaural synthesis and cross-talk cancellation, enables to reproduce multichannel sound by using fewer actual loudspeakers. However, conventional transaural reproduction with two frontal loudspeakers is only able to recreate virtual source in the frontalhorizontal quadrants. In present work, a method for transaural reproduction of spatial surround sound using four actual loudspeakers is proposed. The four actual loudspeakers are arranged in the left-front and right-front directions in the horizontal plane, as well as left-front-up, right-front-up directions in a higher elevation plane, respectively. It is proved experimentally that, with transaural processing, this loudspeaker arrangement is able to recreate virtual source within the frontal-hemispherical directions. In practical use for TV set, the actual fourloudspeaker configuration can be realized by a pair of horizontal sound-bars (barshape loudspeaker boxes) arranged on and below the TV set, respectively; or realized by a pair of vertical sound-bars arranged on two sides of the TV set, respectively.