A virtual bass system with improved overflow control

The virtual bass system (VBS) can enhance the bass performance of small or flat loudspeakers by tricking the human brain to perceive the fundamental frequency from its higher harmonics. However, additional harmonics may lead to arithmetic overflow and cause distortion due to clipping, especially during high-level transient components. Past research pay little attention on this problem, and manual control of VBS gain settings is required to prevent overflow. Users need to manually adjust the gain settings for different sound tracks, which can be very troublesome. In this paper, we propose a VBS that can efficiently prevent the overflow problem by automatically controlling the gain settings for additional harmonics. This new approach pre-computes the gain limitation for additional harmonics and can be adopted for real-time audio implementation. Objective measurements are carried out to compare the proposed method with the commonly used limiter method.