Distance control of virtual sound source based on switching electro-dynamic and parametric loudspeaker arrays

High presence sound field reproduction technology has recently gained attention. We have previously proposed a virtual sound source (VSS) construction method based on wave field synthesis (WFS) using parametric loudspeaker array (PAL array). The previously proposed method can construct the VSS at any position without relocating the PALs. However, the previously proposed method has difficulty constructing the VSS near the PAL array. In this paper, we propose a new method to control the distance of a VSS based on WFS using an electro-dynamic loudspeaker (EDL) array and a PAL array. The EDL array is suitable to construct VSSs near the loudspeaker array. In contrast, the PAL array is suitable to construct VSSs far away from the loudspeaker array. Therefore, in this method, we place an EDL array and a PAL array parallel to each other and switch the loudspeaker array for VSSs construction depending on the desired position to realize VSS distance control. The threshold of switching loudspeaker array is determined by a subjective preliminary experiment. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method through evaluation experiments.