Sound field reproduction using multilayer equivalent source method

Sound field reproduction is aimed to create or reproduce a desired sound environment, where both the audio content and the spatial property of the sound field are preserved. For a practical reproduction system which is usually placed in a real 'listening room', the acoustic transfer functions measurement of the loudspeaker array is a time consuming work. The equivalent source method is an option to interpolate array acoustic transfer functions of loudspeakers over the target region in reverberant sound field and has been implemented in the preceding researches. However, the selection of the optimized distances of the equivalent sources remains a challenging problem, especially considering the complex acoustic environment in reverberant room. In this work, we apply a multilayer equivalent source method. A numerical simulation is conducted in virtual listening rooms with different reverberation conditions to investigate the reproduction performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the quality of the reproduced target sound field is improved comparing with the conventional single layer equivalent source method.