Reproduction of immersive sound using directional and conventional loudspeakers

Visual and audio cues play very important roles in 3D media. In such media, 3D sound effects allow game developer or a movie director to position sound effects potentially anywhere in a virtual space surrounding the viewer. Hence, accuracy of 3D sound is critical to prevent any degradation of the overall 3D experience. While there are many breakthroughs in the display technology, 3D visual content is still delivered with the current audio systems, which does not accurately deliver 3D sound. This limitation is directly linked to the dispersive nature of the conventional loudspeaker, and the reproduced 3D sound may be perceived to lack sharpness in the spatial imaging due to reverberant nature of the room acoustics. For a directional loudspeaker, the reproduced 3D sound may seem to lack spaciousness due to little influence by the room acoustics. Since most of the loudspeakers in existing sound system are dispersive in nature, 3D audio image tends to be degraded. To solve this problem, we propose a unique setup which comprises of conventional and directional loudspeakers. This setup exploits high directivity of directional loudspeakers to recreate a high quality 3D sound and to recreate the spaciousness of the audio using the conventional loudspeaker.