Abstract
Sound calibration is employed in many commercial audio systems for improving sound quality. This process includes the estimation of the room transfer function (RTF) between each loudspeaker and a microphone located at the listeners’ position. Current methods for RTF estimation employ calibration signals, such as noise or tones, in a dedicated process applied to each loudspeaker separately. Such an estimation disrupts normal playback, is time consuming, and requires user intervention. A perceptually-transparent online RTF estimation method for a two-channel system, which employs calibration signals generated using the original audio signals and complementary filters, is proposed in this article. These calibration signals are uncorrelated across the two channels, which facilitates the online estimation of both channels using a single microphone. Estimation performance is investigated for an experimental system and displays low estimation errors. Finally, a subjective evaluation via a listening test shows that playback of calibration signals is perceptually-transparent under some of the conditions investigated.
Highlights
S OUND calibration for audio systems is a process in which the parameters of each channel or each loudspeaker are adjusted to improve sound quality
Current methods for room transfer function (RTF) estimation employ excitation, or calibration signals, to estimate the RTF in a dedicated process applied to each loudspeaker separately, and a microphone assumed to be located in the vicinity of the listeners
An RTF estimation process for multi-channel audio systems that more naturally integrates with the normal operation of the system and that is perceptually-transparent to listeners could be of great interest
Summary
S OUND calibration for audio systems is a process in which the parameters of each channel or each loudspeaker are adjusted to improve sound quality. An RTF estimation process for multi-channel audio systems that more naturally integrates with the normal operation of the system and that is perceptually-transparent to listeners could be of great interest Such a process could be made automatic, without requiring user-intervention, and could be applied when necessary to compensate for time-varying acoustic conditions. Playback with only one loudspeaker at a time to facilitate estimation could be considered as an interruption (see the listening experiment in Section VI), and playback of standard calibration signals such as sine sweeps instead of the normal audio would be considered a major interruption The approach behind this method is inspired by the use of dichotic stimuli in hearing aids, where spectral splitting with complementary filter banks is applied to produce signals for two channels [26], [27]. A subjective evaluation of the proposed method is presented in Section VI, showing how playback of calibration signals compares with playback of the original unprocessed signals with respect to perception
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