Digital Equalization of Room Acoustics

Signal processing methods such as digital equalization can in theory achieve a reduction in acoustic reverberation. In practice, however, the realization of these methods is only partially successful for a number of objective and subjective reasons. Two of these problems, the dependence of the equalizer performance on the source and receiver positions and the requirement for extremely lengthy filters, are addressed. It is proposed that all pole modeling of room responses can relax the equalizer filter length requirement, and the use of vector quantization can optimally classify such responses, obtained at different source and receiver positions. Such classification can be used as a spatial equalization library, achieving reduction in reverberation over a wide range of positions within an enclosure; as was confirmed by a number of tests