Design of a Wideband Linear Microphone Array for High-Quality Audio Recording

Zhou H, Lu J, Qiu X. Design of a Wideband Linear Microphone Array for High-Quality Audio Recording. J Audio Eng Soc. 2018;66(3):154-166. doi:10.17743/jaes.2018.0004

@article{Zhou2018_19383,
  author = {Zhou, Haoran and Lu, Jing and Qiu, Xiaojun},
  title = {{Design of a Wideband Linear Microphone Array for High-Quality Audio Recording}},
  journal = {Journal of the Audio Engineering Society},
  volume = {66},
  number = {3},
  pages = {154--166},
  year = {2018},
  month = mar,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  doi = {10.17743/jaes.2018.0004},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2018.0004}
}

TY  - JOUR
TI  - Design of a Wideband Linear Microphone Array for High-Quality Audio Recording
AU  - Zhou, Haoran
AU  - Lu, Jing
AU  - Qiu, Xiaojun
T2  - Journal of the Audio Engineering Society
J2  - J. Audio Eng. Soc.
VL  - 66
IS  - 3
SP  - 154
EP  - 166
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2018/03/06
DO  - 10.17743/jaes.2018.0004
UR  - https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2018.0004
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Because of their superior directional properties, shotgun microphones are preferable choices for high-quality speech and audio recording in environments with intense ambient noise. However, their low- and middle-frequency directivities are usually not sufficiently high for practical usage. Alternatively, linear microphone arrays with unequally spaced elements enable high wideband directivity with a small number of microphones. A general procedure for designing such arrays steered at the endfire direction with unequally spaced elements is proposed for high-quality audio recording from 20 Hz to 16 kHz. A simulated annealing method is used to iteratively optimize the spatial distribution for microphones that do not have matched amplitude and phase. The challenge in the optimization process arises because large bandwidth requires large matrices, which produces large accumulation error. Therefore, the optimization process needs to be carefully regularized with the error being restricted to a relatively small tolerable level. The proposed method can produce microphone arrays with higher directivity than the corresponding shotgun microphones of the same length with comparable low self-noise level.
ER  -