Reproduction of independent narrowband soundfields in a multizone surround system and its extension to speech signal sources

While higher order ambisonic approaches can be used to generate multiple zone soundfields, this paper adopts a Least Squares matching approach which provides a more flexible formulation. The base approach, adopted from computes speaker weights which allow for the placement of single sources in the soundfield. In this paper the approach is extended firstly to two multi-frequency sources and then to narrowband speech signals. The results for multi-frequency sources explore the zonal soundfield errors resulting from varied source positions. For speech signals, the approach provides a potential solution for multiple conversation reproduction in a multi user environment. The paper results indicate that the approach is feasible for zones which do not suffer occlusion effects from other zones. However, for more versatile multizone soundfield reproduction a 3D approach is recommended.