The role of listener position sensing in dynamic crosstalk cancellation with headrest speakers

Carvalho D, Ushakov Y, Hollebon J, Simon M. The role of listener position sensing in dynamic crosstalk cancellation with headrest speakers. In: 2026 AES 6th International Automotive Audio Conference. Audio Engineering Society; 2026. Paper 16. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23409

@inproceedings{Carvalho2026_23409,
  author = {Carvalho, Davi and Ushakov, Yury and Hollebon, Jacob and Simon, Marcos},
  title = {{The role of listener position sensing in dynamic crosstalk cancellation with headrest speakers}},
  booktitle = {2026 AES 6th International Automotive Audio Conference},
  note = {Paper 16},
  year = {2026},
  month = jul,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23409}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - The role of listener position sensing in dynamic crosstalk cancellation with headrest speakers
AU  - Carvalho, Davi
AU  - Ushakov, Yury
AU  - Hollebon, Jacob
AU  - Simon, Marcos
T2  - 2026 AES 6th International Automotive Audio Conference
M1  - Paper 16
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/29
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23409
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Binaural audio reproduced over loudspeakers requires crosstalk cancellation (CTC) to deliver independent signals to each of a listeners ears. CTC is a local sound field control technique, and the channel separation it provides degrades rapidly as the listener moves away from the position for which the filters were designed, particularly at high frequencies. This paper quantifies the role of real-time listener position sensing in headrest-mounted CTC systems for automotive use. Acoustic transfer functions were measured in situ in a vehicle cabin using two Neumann KU100 dummy heads over a 1 cm grid of listener positions. Three conditions are compared: an adaptive system whose filters track the measured head position, a static system with filters fixed at a nominal position, and a pass-through baseline without CTC. Performance is evaluated using a worst-case multi-listener channel-separation metric. A head displacement of only 1 cm is shown to reduce the static CTC level by approximately 10 dB above 1 kHz, and beyond roughly 5 cm the static system performs no better than pass-through at high frequencies. In contrast, the adaptive system retains a large and consistent channel-separation advantage over the static system, together with a stable ipsilateral pressure, across the full range of displacements. These results demonstrate that head tracking is essential for robust multi-listener binaural reproduction in automotive environments.
ER  -