Wide-area psychoacoustic correction for problematic room-modes using nonlinear bass synthesis

Abstract

Small room acoustics are characterized by a limited number of dominant low-frequency room-modes that result in wide spatio-pressure variations that traditional room correction systems may find elusive to correct over a broad listening area. A psychoacoustic-based methodology is proposed whereby signal components coincident only with problematic modes are filtered and substituted by virtual bass components to forge an illusion of the suppressed frequencies. Although this approach can constitute a standalone correction system, the impetus for development is for use within well-established correction methodologies. A scalable and hierarchical approach is studied using subjective evaluation to confirm uniform wide-area performance. Bass synthesis exploits parallel nonlinear and phase vocoder generators with outputs blended as a function of transient and steady-state signal content.