Research on headphone perceptual sound field enlargement technique

Enlarging Headphone Sound Fields for AR/VR

Abstract

As AR/VR rises, the demand for larger sound fields drives ongoing research and industrial manufactures in headphone soundscapes. In contrast, a systematic review of these studies and products is needed to help the headphone sound field designing in meeting AR/VR requirements. In this work, the principle of perception of the sound field is first explained, and then several headphones are tested and classified to form a review of enlarging sound field design. Utilized by both target frequency response curves and manufactured periods, these headphones are classified into three categories: open-front chamber design, large-closed-front chamber design, and computational virtual surrounding design. Upon our test, the open-front design showed great acoustic superiority over the large-close-front although many studies and products have proposed to implement the large-close-front design. Despite the application of psycho-acoustic, this review did not find computational virtual surrounding design significantly better than the other two. In conclusion, this review featured a combination of open-front design and virtual surrounding algorithms using neural networks.