AES 5th International Conference on Automotive Audio

The loudspeaker configuration in a car is far from a conventional stereophonic one. The aim of this study was to evaluate the consequences of such an unusual configuration on the perception of the localisation of virtual sound sources. Experiments on the directional perception of virtual sources in an automotive environment were performed using conventional loudspeaker configurations. The sources, consisting of broadband pink noise bursts, were laterally spatialised using the Virtual Based Amplitude Panning (VBAP) method. Participants were asked to point their nose in the direction of the perceived sound source. Their head movements were recorded by a headtracker. The differences between the perceived directions and those predicted by the VBAP method in a classical stereo configuration were measured. In addition, several models of azimuth perception were compared with the experimental data. An extended energy vector model, taking into account the precedence effect, gave results in agreement with the experimental data. The model inputs are the relative position, time delay and level of each loudspeaker. This model could be used as a tool for assessing spatial restitution, loudspeaker implementation and audio tuning.