Comparative study of loudspeaker position optimization techniques for multizone sound field reproduction

Mutlizone sound field reproduction aims to generate personal sound zones in a shared space with multiple loudspeakers. Conventionally, loudspeakers are placed to form a regular pattern such as circular, arc or linear array, which are empirical rather than optimal mainly for the convenience of physical placement. Recently, several algorithms have been proposed to select a fixed number of loudspeaker locations from a large set of candidate positions, such as the sparse regularization (i.e. Lasso and Elastic Net) methods, the Constrained Match Pursuit (CMP) method, the Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization (GSO) method etc. Most of these methods were investigated for single-zone rather than mulit-zone sound field reproduction based on the pressure matching techniques. This paper compares the performance of the state-of-the-art techniques for loudspeaker position optimization in a multizone sound field reproduction system in terms of reproduction error, acoustic contrast and array effort. Simulation results demonstrate that the CMP-LS method shows the best performance in terms of lower MSE and higher AC while the Lasso method needs the lowest AE.