Evaluation of a perceptually optimized room-in-room reproduction method for playback room compensation

In sound reproduction it is usually desired to reproduce a sound source as accurate as possible to achieve a natural and realistic sound representation of the sound source. A perceptually motivated sound reproduction approach was suggested by [Grosse, van de Par, IEEE, 2015] where only the perceptually most relevant cues of a sound eld in the recording room are considered. These perceptually relevant cues are the coloration of the sound source, the interaural cross correlation (IACC), which is linked to the listener envelopment, and the reverberation time. Based on this the direct and reverberant sound are rendered over spatially distributed loudspeakers in the playback room while optimizing the direct and reverberant sound eld such that the considered cues of the recording room coincide with the reproduced cues in the playback room. A MUSHRA-test showed rather good results for the proposed optimization (listening room compensation, sweet-spot robustness) compared to a simple room-in-room or multichannel reproduction in terms of the overall sound quality. This follow-up study considers several important perceptual aspects and general problems which will occur when a sound source is rendered in a playback room. A subjective listening test is presented where the focus is on perceptual attributes like the perceived timbre, realism and plausibility of various alternative approaches to sound reproduction compared to the perceptually optimized room-in-room reproduction.