Acoustic contrast control in two regions in car cabins

Personal audio systems that generate different sound zones in different regions have received much interest recently, especially in car cabins. The feasibility of creating a listening zone at the driver's seat and a quiet zone at the passenger's seat with the headrest speakers, door loudspeakers, and the combination of them is investigated in this manuscript. A finite element model of a car interior is created in COMSOL Multiphysics to obtain the acoustic transfer functions and the acoustic contrast control performances of 4 different speaker configurations are compared with each other. It is found that the 4 headrest speakers achieve better acoustic contrast control performance than the door speakers at low frequencies, while the sound pressure level distribution tends to be more uniform in the bright zone when using the door speakers.