Spatial Analysis and Synthesis of Car Audio System and Car Cabin Acoustics with a Compact Microphone Array

This research proposes a spatial sound analysis and synthesis approach for automobile sound systems, where the acquisition of the measurement data is much faster than with the Binaural Car Scanning method. This approach avoids the problems that are typically found with binaural reproduction and dummy head measurements. In combination with a compact microphone array, the approach is based on the recently introduced parametric spatial sound analysis method, called the Spatial Decomposition Method (SDM). An objective analysis of the sound field with respect to direction and energy enables the synthesis of multichannel loudspeaker reproduction. Because of the extreme acoustics of an automobile cabin, the authors recommend several steps to improve both the objective and perceptual performance. Because SDM is a parametric approach to spatial impulse response analysis, this allows automobile audio systems to be tuned in a laboratory environment instead of in-situ.