A Listener Position Adaptive Stereo System for Object-Based Reproduction

Stereo reproduction of spatial audio allows the creation of stable acoustic images when the listener is placed in the sweet spot, a small region in the vicinity of the axis of symmetry between both loudspeakers. If the listener moves slightly towards one of the sources, however, the images collapse to the loudspeaker the listener is leaning to. In order to overcome such limitation, a stereo reproduction technique that adapts the sweet spot to the listener position is presented here. This strategy introduces a new approach that maximizes listener immersion by rendering object-based audio, in which several audio objects or sources are placed at virtual locations between the stereo span. By using a video tracking device, the listener is allowed to move freely between the loudspeaker span, while loudspeaker outputs are compensated using conventional panning algorithms so that the position of the different audio objects is kept independent from that of the listener