Acoustic feedback suppression in audio mixer for PA applications

Abstract: When a speaker is addressing an audience, a PA system consisting of a microphone and a loudspeaker is often used. If the microphone picks up too much of the loudspeaker energy, acoustic feedback in the form of an unwanted characteristic howling can occur. Limes Audio is a software company that specializes in improving sound quality in digital communications, mainly conference telephony, and has developed a reference product, the Magneto mixer, to demonstrate the capability of their software TrueVoice. The company now wishes to expand the field of usage for the Magneto mixer to enable it to work as a microphone mixer in PA scenarios, and for this, a feedback suppression feature is needed. This master’s thesis aims at surveying the market and the literature in the field and specifying the requirements for a feedback suppression feature. Three methods for suppressing howling feedback are evaluated through simulations and compared in terms of maximum stable gain (MSG) and subjective listening experience. The method that performed the best based on these criteria was acoustic feedback cancellation with a 5 Hz frequency shift on the loudspeaker signal. This method makes use of an adaptive filter to model the acoustic feedback path and to remove the feedback component from the microphone signal. In the simulations, the method was able to increase the stable gain by approximately 10 dB while maintaining a good sound quality.