Notes, Limitations, and Solutions
The sonic space can be written and composed all the more finely and faithfully when it incorporates a projection system surrounding the audience.
This spatialization technique extends intelligibility through greater coherence in the distribution of loudspeakers in space.
It also allows extending the listening area, unlike stereophonic reproduction.
However, if one considers the frontal plane (stage area) as the most demanding in terms of reproduction or (re)production, the homogeneity of perception will still be constrained as one approaches it: sound sources on stage will not always faithfully correspond to visual perception at the listening point. A certain degree of distortion, all things considered, will persist in some situations.
Frontal perception, as a reminder, is our zone of comfort and perceptual refinement — more visually than auditorily, in fact.
Also, thanks to a reproduction of the acoustic field produced by a source, as an extension of simple sound projection, natural conditions of perception will ensure the same auditory sensations despite sometimes very different listening positions. This is the key strength of WFS wave field synthesis.
Advantages:
- Low computational cost with great efficiency.
- Precise source positioning, especially on the horizontal plane (azimuth in 2D).
- Precise and impactful sound image.
Disadvantages:
- Favors a small central listening zone (sweet spot at the center of the system) beyond which the sound space will be increasingly distorted, while sources remain localizable (but with altered positions).
- Does not simulate distance, only the perceived angular position. Sources are located on the same sound plane.
- With the exception of KNN, only two or three loudspeakers (depending on whether in 2D or 3D) participate in reproducing a source, thus reducing the immersive effect.
- With the exception of KNN, the loudspeaker distribution strongly constrains the homogeneity of distances between loudspeakers. In 3D, each triangle of loudspeakers will form a volumetric surface of the polyhedron type in order to describe a sphere: equal distance between loudspeakers.