On the effects of nonlinearities in room impulse response measurements with exponential sweeps

In room impulse response measurements, there are some common disturbances that affect the measured results. These disturbances include nonlinearity, noise and time variance. In this paper, the effects of nonlinearities in the measurements with exponential sweep-sine signals are analyzed from different perspectives. The analysis combines theoretical approach, simulations and measurements. The focus is on distortion artifacts in the causal part of the impulse response and their effects on room acoustical parameters. The results show that the sweep-sine method is vulnerable to a certain extent to nonlinearities from a theoretical standpoint, but the consequences of this vulnerability are reduced in the responses measured in practice. However, due to irretrievable contamination of the impulse responses, the nonlinearities (especially strong ones) should be avoided.