The loudspeaker array studio (LAS) consists of a semi-anechoic test booth (3 m x 3 m) and a control room. In the booth, 91 loudspeakers (arranged in a spherical order) and 2 subwoofers (driven by 4 drivers in total) can be used to provide loudspeaker-based reproduction of virtual sound sources. The booth is further equipped with in-ear microphones for listener-specific HRTF measurement. Combined with a head-tracked VR setup and personalized headphone presentation, the high number of loudspeakers enables many applications, for example:
- Virtual acoustics: Presentation of (moving) sound sources from any given directions by controlling each loudspeakers separately. Potential applicable methods are the vector base amplitude panning (VBAP) or 7th-order Ambisonics;
- Cocktail-party effect: Demonstrates the importance of spatial hearing in everyday's life;
- Reverberation: Artificial reverberation can be created to investigate the perception of various types of rooms and their corresponding acoustic properties. Early reflections can be created by means of mirror sources and diffuse reverberation by means of feedback delay networks (FDN);
- Comparison across binaural and loudspeaker-based reproduction: Listener-specific HRTFs can be measured in the LAS and used to create personalized binaural reproduction. The effects of that binaural reproduction can be tested in VR and compared to the loudspeaker-based reproduction involving the natural HRTFs of the listener.
