In a recent paper the percetual evaluation of sound fields created by Sound Field Synthesis is discussed:
H. Wierstorf, S. Spors, and A. Raake. Perception and evaluation of sound fields. In
Open Seminar on Acoustics, September 2012.
Abstract– Sound field synthesis techniques claim to recreate a desired sound field within an extended listening area. In order to investigate the perceptual properties of the synthesized sound field the listener has to be placed at different positions. In practice that can be quite difficult with real loudspeakers. Another possibility to perform listening tests is to present the field via binaural synthesis. This study investigates whether binaural synthesis is perceptually transparent for the purpose of localization studies for sound field synthesis. A localization test is performed comparing real loudspeakers to two different binaural synthesis configurations using non-individual head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), once with and once without reflections. The results show only slight differences between real speakers and HRTFs-based synthesis, resulting in a one degree greater localization blur for the HRTFs without reflections than for the other two cases.
