Listener envelopment and listener engulfment refer to the sensations of being ’surrounded by sound’ and ’being covered by sound’, respectively. In multichannel loudspeaker arrangements, listeners at off-center seats typically experience a reduced sensation of envelopment and engulfment due to a directional imbalance towards nearby loudspeakers. The experiment presented in this study investigates the effect of different loudspeaker sound pressure level (SPL) decay profiles on the off-center distance limit, at which envelopment or engulfment break down. Three different profiles are considered: 0, -3, and -6 dB SPL decay per doubling of distance, simulated by controlling the levels of point-source loudspeakers based on the listener position. The experiment results indicate a significant expansion of the off-center limit of envelopment when horizontally surrounding loudspeakers exhibit a -3 dB SPL decay. Regarding engulfment, the experiment shows that the off-center limit is expanded by a wide distribution of height loudspeakers that covers the entire audience area. A computational model confirms that the optimal loudspeaker SPL decay for envelopment is the one that minimizes the interaural level difference (ILD) and interaural coherence (IC) over an extended area. An interesting finding from simulations is that purely lateral multichannel arrangements can benefit from a 0 dB rather than -3 dB SPL decay per doubling of distance.
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https://aes2.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22368
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