A hybrid speaker array-headphone system for immersive 3D audio reproduction

Spatial sound systems aim at rendering realistic sound experience to the listeners with uniform sound fields in the entire listening area. Today with the advancement of multichannel surround sound techniques, such systems are being practically realized, especially, at theatres, lecture halls, auditoriums, etc. Current practices, which are most widely used as home theatre systems, are based on multichannel stereophony, like 5.1, 10.2 and higher surround channel system. These systems require multiple loudspeakers to be placed in fixed configuration but often constrained by the room size. Sound reproduction systems like wave field synthesis (WFS) based on principle of natural propagation of sound waves, can create replica of true sound field uniformly over an extended listening area. However, WFS based systems too require hundreds of densely spaced loudspeakers enclosing the listener area and thus, difficult to realize in homes. In this paper, we introduce a new hybrid system by combining the WFS and binaural synthesis over headphones (based on active noise control techniques) to reduce the need of installing loudspeakers everywhere in a living room.