Efficient Multi-Channel Adaptive Room Compensation for Spatial Soundfield Reproduction Using a Modal Decomposition

Mitigating the effects of reverberation is a significant challenge for real-world spatial soundfield reproduction, but the necessity of a large number of reproduction channels increases the complexity and presents several challenges to existing listening room compensation techniques. In this paper, we present an adaptive room compensation method to overcome the effects of reverberation within a region, using a model description of the reverberant soundfield. We propose the reverberant channel estimation and compensation be carried out in a single step using completely decoupled adaptive filters; thus, reducing the complexity of the overall process. We compare the soundfield reproduction performance with existing adaptive and nonadaptive room compensation methods through several simulation examples. The performance of the proposed method is comparable to existing techniques, and achieves a normalized wideband region reproduction error of 1% at a signal-to-noise ratio of 50 dB, within a 1 m radius region of interest using 60 loudspeakers and 55 microphones at frequencies below 1 kHz. Robust behavior of the room compensator is demonstrated down to direct-to-reverberant-path power ratios of -5 dB. Overall, the results suggest that the proposed method can diagonalize the room compensation system, leading to a more robust and parallel implementation for spatial soundfield reproduction.