First measurements of a large-aperture microphone array system for remote audio acquisition

Poor sound pick up by remote microphones in multimedia applications, conference rooms and auditoria has traditionally hampered recording and communicating among spatially-separated groups. The culprits are reverberation (multipath distortion) and interfering acoustic noise. The typical solution is to obtain close-talking pick up from participants by passing microphones among talkers, or requiring individuals to approach a microphone station. Both are unsatisfactory, time-consuming, and inconvenient. The challenge is to obtain high-quality sound pick up from microphones far from the talker that do not encumber the user by hand-held, body-worn or tethered equipment. One solution is to apply an array of microphones and sophisticated signal processing. A brief description of a large, real-time, working system is presented and early results from using this system are given. Results include measured and theoretical signal-to-noise performance, beampatterns, and the dispersion of location estimates