Effort variation regularization in sound field reproduction

In this paper, active control is used in order to reproduce a given sound field in an extended spatial region. A method is proposed which minimizes the reproduction error at a number of control positions with the reproduction sources holding a certain relation within their complex strengths. Specifically, it is suggested that the phase differential of the source driving signals should be in agreement with the phase differential of the desired sound pressure field. The performance of the suggested method is compared with that of conventional effort regularization, wave field synthesis (WFS), and adaptive wave field synthesis (AWFS), both under free-field conditions and in reverberant rooms. It is shown that effort variation regularization overcomes the problems associated with small spaces and with a low ratio of direct to reverberant energy, improving thus the reproduction accuracy in the listening room.