EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL CONFIGURATIONS ON ANC HEADPHONE PERFORMANCE
Lei Wu, Xiaojun Qiu, Jie Ma, Yu Guo · 2024
The ear-shell which includes a rigid shell and a soft cushion, the reference microphone, the error microphone and the secondary loudspeaker are four main parts of the physical configuration of an active noise control (ANC) headphone. To investigate their influences on ANC performance, the ear-shells of ANC headphones from two different manufacturers are selected and the same method is used to optimize their ANC controllers. It is shown that the ANC performance is different due to the disparities of physical configuration. The coherence between the reference microphone and the error microphone signals is a measure to evaluate physical configuration effects on feedforward structures, and the passive attenuation affected by the rigid shell and the soft cushion is reflected in the magnitude frequency response from the reference microphone to error microphone. The delay of the secondary path is a critical factor to influence the performance of both feedforward and feedback structures.