The generation of independent or personal listening zones is of significant interest in the car cabin environment. As such there are a number of methods of optimizing loudspeaker arrays to achieve personal audio reproduction. The optimization methods currently in the literature generally have a trade-off between the level of acoustic contrast between the bright and dark zones and the variance of the sound pressure within the bright zone. A high level of variance in the bright zone may produce a subjectively poor performance and although this may be overcome using the least squares or acoustic contrast with planarity control methods, they are generally non-trivial to setup to achieve both a high level of acoustic contrast and a low level of variance. This paper proposes a new optimization method which maximizes the acoustic contrast with a constraint that limits the sound differences within the bright zone and is relatively straightforward to setup. The performance of the proposed optimization method is compared to acoustic contrast maximization, least squares and acoustic contrast maximization with planarity control methods through a series of simulations of a car cabin personal audio system.
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