Realization of Surround Audio by Quadraphonic Headset

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology and Internet in recent years, digital video and audio applications are widely used in human life. For the increasing demands of human perception of multimedia, the traditional mono or stereo audio playback is not able to satisfy human ears. Therefore, multi-channel audio systems become more popular. However, in the views of limited available personal space and relatively expensive multi-channel audio system, a low-cost multi-channel audio player, such as a headset, that can be used anytime or anywhere is very attractive.

In this work, we design a four-channel headset to achieve the 5.1-channel-like hearing experience. In the proposed architecture, we first modify the down-mixing structure in ITU-R BS.775-1 standard to convert 5.1-channel audio into four channels. Second, we utilize the head related transfer function (HRTF) to enhance the position difference between front and rear, which is missing in traditional stereo earphones. In addition, we utilize artificial reverberation to enhance the hearing experience in a closed space.

From subjective hearing tests, the proposed four-channel headset achieves almost the same hearing perception as a 5.1-channel system while the hardware cost of the proposed four-channel headset is much lower than a 5.1-channel system.