Small room acoustics are characterized by a limited number of dominant low-frequency room modes which result in wide spatio-pressure variations that traditional room-correction systems 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. A scalable and hierarchical approach is studied using the Chameleon Subwoofer Array (CSA) and subjective evaluation confirms a uniform large-area performance. Bass synthesis exploits parallel nonlinear and phase vocoder generators with outputs blended as a function of transient and steady-state signal content.
Wide-area psychoacoustic correction for problematic room modes using non-linear bass synthesis
Small room acoustics are characterized by a limited number of dominant low-frequency room modes which result in wide spatio-pressure variations that traditional room-correction systems 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. A scalable and hierarchical approach is studied using the Chameleon Subwoofer Array (CSA) and subjective evaluation confirms a uniform large-area performance. Bass synthesis exploits parallel nonlinear and phase vocoder generators with outputs blended as a function of transient and steady-state signal content.

