Effect of noise and transducer variability on the performance of circular microphone arrays

The practical performance of circular microphone arrays is discussed. Such arrays are useful for the analysis of room acoustics, the recording of live sound fields for surround sound reproduction, and in teleconferencing applications. They also produce low-cost performance relative to three-dimensional arrays when sound sources and loudspeaker reproduction systems are predominantly in the horizontal plane. The noise performance of circular arrays and their sensitivity to transducer variability are considered, and examples are given for the ideal first-order array. In addition, the analysis of arrays using a recently proposed downsampling technique is included.