Effectiveness of horizontal personal sound systems for listeners of variable heights

Standard surround systems for generation of isolated wideband soundfields employ uniformly-spaced array of speakers in the horizontal plane. For these systems, the evaluation of sound reproduction with height is important due to listener´s variable heights. Previous work demonstrated that controlling both the speakers´ location and their complex weights using two-stage Lasso-LS pressure matching optimization allows isolated sound reproduction with limited number of speakers within the speakers´ plane. This work demonstrates that deployment of this technique can also give up to 24dB in suppression of sound at heights between zero and one meter from speakers´ plane over single-stage LS using e.g. 90 speakers in a semicircular array.