HMA-III: A self-calibrating wireless microphone array system

Our past research has focused on wired microphone arrays having a large number of elements and wide aperture. The wiring for these large arrays is tedious and only a tree structure with intermediate multiplexing of signals works well. A wireless array alleviates this immense wiring issue, albeit other difficulties are introduced including interferences in the wireless transmissions, synchronization, the need for automatic self-calibration, and module power, size and mounting. This paper introduces our first successful wireless array system, HMA-III. It discusses the desired attributes for such an array and the tradeoffs made to assemble a first working system. Results for the automatic self-calibration are presented.