Perceptional comparison of wave field synthesis implemented with integer and fractional delays

Wave field synthesis (WFS) is an approach to the physical synthesis of sound fields over an extended receiver area by means of arrays of loudspeakers. The implementation of simple virtual source models like plane and spherical waves in WFS employs delays which are applied to the input signals. These delays can take values which are not equal to integer multiples of the sampling interval on a time discrete system but require the application fractional delays [1]. For practical implementations the application of delays equal to integer multiples of the sampling interval is desired since these delays are computationally significantly more efficient than fractional delays. The experiment presented in this paper investigates the question whether such a quantization of the delays in practical implementations leads to a perceptional impairment.