A Study on the Improving Speech Intelligibility of Sound Reinforcement System in Reverberant Rooms

Speech may not be clearly understandable in the room that is highly reverberant, due to the loss of consonants intelligibility. Therefore, it is very important to obtain a high sound pressure level of direct sound in reverberant room. A properly designed sound reinforcement system can not provide the good speech intelligibility without the absorption treatments of walls. With using the highly directional speaker, we can transmit the sound energy into only the areas where people are sitting. This can be help to improve the speech intelligibility. In this paper, even in reverberant rooms, it will be shown that the good speech intelligibility can be obtained by only the directivity control of speaker without the room treatment. Also, it would be more improved by the properly room tuning using an equalizer.