Reproducing personal sound zones using a hybrid synthesis of dynamic and parametric loudspeakers

This paper proposes a hybrid approach to personal sound zones utilising multizone soundfield reproduction techniques and parametric loudspeakers. Crossover filters are designed, to switch between reproduction methods, through analytical analysis of aliasing artifacts in multizone reproductions. By realising the designed crossover filters, wideband acoustic contrast between zones is significantly improved. The trade-off between acoustic contrast and the bandwidth of the reproduced soundfield is investigated. Results show that by incorporating the proposed hybrid model the whole wideband bandwidth is spatial-aliasing free with a mean acoustic contrast consistently above 54.2dB, an improvement of up to 24.2dB from a non-hybrid approach, with as few as 16 dynamic loudspeakers and one parametric loudspeaker.