An alternative design for multichannel and multiple listener room acoustic equalization

Room acoustic equalization in a multichannel and multiple listener environments, has been studied extensively and involves designing an equalization filter, separate or independent for each channel, by analyzing the speaker-room responses at multiple positions for each specific channel. Existing approaches do not consider the combined effects of the sound field generated by multiple speakers in the multichannel setup, despite the signals being simultaneously transmitted from individual channels (e.g., stereo or multichannel 5.1 signals). In this paper, we present an alternative approach for designing multichannel and multiple listener equalization filters through a joint-optimization process that involves analysis of the combined sound fields from a multichannel system. We consider two cases, one where the number of listeners are equal to the number of channels and another where the numbers of listeners are more than the number of channels. We also compare the results from the proposed approach to the industry standard root-mean-square (RMS) averaging approach that generates a filter that is independent for each channel.