Listener envelopment and listener engulfment refer to the sensations of being ’surrounded by sound’ and ’being covered by sound’, respectively. In multichannel loudspeaker arrangements, listeners at off-center seats typically experience a reduced sensation of envelopment and engulfment due to a directional imbalance towards nearby loudspeakers. The experiment presented in this study investigates the effect of different loudspeaker sound pressure level (SPL) decay profiles on the off-center distance limit, at which envelopment or engulfment break down. Three different profiles are considered: 0, -3, and -6 dB SPL decay per doubling of distance, simulated by controlling the levels of point-source loudspeakers based on the listener position. The experiment results indicate a significant expansion of the off-center limit of envelopment when horizontally surrounding loudspeakers exhibit a -3 dB SPL decay. Regarding engulfment, the experiment shows that the off-center limit is expanded by a wide distribution of height loudspeakers that covers the entire audience area. A computational model confirms that the optimal loudspeaker SPL decay for envelopment is the one that minimizes the interaural level difference (ILD) and interaural coherence (IC) over an extended area. An interesting finding from simulations is that purely lateral multichannel arrangements can benefit from a 0 dB rather than -3 dB SPL decay per doubling of distance.

Authors: Riedel, Stefan; Frank, Matthias; Zotter, Franz; Sazdov, Robert
Affiliations: Institute of Electcronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria; Institute of Electcronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria; Institute of Electcronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria; School of Communication, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Conference: AES 2024 International Conference on Acoustics & Sound Reinforcement (January 2024)
Paper Number: 6
Publication Date: January 23, 2024
Subject: Acoustics & Sound Reinforcment

Download Now (4.0 MB)

This paper is Open Access which means you can download it for free.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.