Abstract
Personal Sound Zones (PSZ) systems are used to create customized listening areas using loudspeaker arrays, achieving listening zones with different audio signals, without headphones. For this purpose, these systems are optimized to obtain a filter bank, with a filter for each loudspeaker, so that the array can generate an area in space with a particular sound (bright zone) and another where the sound of that emission is cancelled (dark zone), and vice versa for another sound. One of the biggest challenges for the widespread use of PSZ systems is that
the construction of those filters requires a large set of precise source-receiver impulse responses, i.e., one for each array loudspeaker and multiple receiver points in the potential listening areas. Measuring these impulse responses is, however, very time-consuming, and usually requires expensive and high-quality acoustical instrumentation. In this communication, we present preliminary results of testing the reliability of the use of commercial room acoustics simulation software to obtain the required set of impulse responses, without performing in situ measurements. We evaluate the influence of different simulation setups (e.g., emitter/receiver directivities, environmental conditions, transition order, model calibration, etc.) on the performance of a PSZ system, in terms of acoustic contrast.
