Sound field reproduction for consumer and professional audio applications

Sound field reproduction has been developed for the last twenty years in research laboratories but has only made its way into the professional market and consumer markets a few years ago. Sound field reproduction addresses the major problem of classical channel based reproduction (two channel stereophony and its derivation: 5.1 and 7.1) that can only reproduce accurately the spatial properties of sound scenes within a very restricted listening area. Sound field reproduction enables to expand the size of the listening area up to the entire listening room, thus providing a collective experience. This paper provides a review of existing sound field reproduction technologies and an analysis of their applicability to real life applications. It also outlines the key dependency of these sound field reproduction techniques to the delivery format of the audio content. Various applications are reviewed ranging from sound reinforcement in live scenario to sound reproduction at home where sound field reproduction is already used.