Reproduction of simulated acoustic scenes with limited number of loudspeakers in a reverberant room

When reproducing virtual acoustic scenes in a reverberant playback room, the acoustics of the playback room degrades the quality of reproduction.Until now, these scenes can only be optimally rendered on dedicated loudspeaker setups placed in an anechoic room using e.g., Ambisonics or wave field synthesis (WFS).When using virtual scenes in clinical applications, it is desirable to reproduce the sound field with a limited number of loudspeakers in a small reverberant room.Recently we have developed an Acoustic Room Transformation (ART) method based on the Ambisonics that perceptually compensates the reverberation of the playback room by separately capturing and reproducing an optimized version of the direct and reverberant sound fields 1.Interestingly, when a virtual acoustic scene is created with a room acoustical simulator e.g.2, the direct and reverberant sound fields are separately available inherently.In this study, the perceptually-based ART method is used to render acoustic environments using only 4 loudspeakers in a reverberant room.A sound-quality evaluation shows that the directional and spectral characteristics of reproduced sound are better preserved when using the ART method compared to standard playback.