Speaker
Description
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Edison company presented so-called "tone tests" to promote their new phonograph. To demonstrate its quality, listeners were presented with live performances and reproductions of different sound sources. Here, we perform a contemporary Edison test that assesses the influence of different methods for resynthesizing sound-source directivity on the plausibility of musical reproduction in a chamber music hall. Performances of violin, oboe and trumpet and reproductions thereof were played behind an acoustically transparent curtain. The participants then had to decide if it was a live performance or a loudspeaker reproduction. The reproduction methods included a studio loudspeaker and a twelve-channel dodecahedral speaker that was operated either with a one-channel recording fed to all drivers or with a twelve-channel recording from a dodecahedral array surrounding a performing musician. Additionally, beamforming was applied in one condition to enhance low-frequency control. In about 48% of all trials, participants accepted the reproduction as a live performance. There were differences between the reproduction methods, indicating that reproductions using the twelve-channel array, where every driver is fed its own signal, might be more plausible than using omnidirectional reproduction or a studio speaker.