An active headrest for personal audio

Jones, Matthew and Elliott, Stephen (2005) An active headrest for personal audio. IWAENC (International Workshop on Acoustic and Echo Noise Control), Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 11 - 14 Sep 2005. pp. 145-148 .

Abstract

This paper reports initial experiments on the practical implementation of a pair of seats with an active headrest designed to reproduce an acoustic signal in one seat, but attenuate it in the adjacent seat. This could be used to realise a "personal audio" system in each seat with reduced interference between seats. A self-contained unit consisting of a pair of loudspeakers has been incorporated into one wing of the headrest. The signal fed to the outer loudspeaker is filtered to maximise the acoustic contrast between the two seats, so that the sound in the adjacent seat is reduced to the greatest possible extent while maintaining the reproduced level in the first seat. The performance predicted through simulations is compared to the measured performance of a real-time implementation. Significant improvements in the acoustic contrast, greater than 20dB, are possible up to about 2kHz, above which the acoustic contrast between the seats is controlled by passive effects such as the directivity of the loudspeakers and the acoustic absorption of the headrest.

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