The stability of multichannel sound systems with time-varying mixing matrices

Various time-varying algorithms have been applied in multichannel sound systems to improve the system's stability and, among these, frequency shifting has been demonstrated to reach the maximum stability improvement achievable by time-variation in general. However, the modulation artifacts have been found to diminish the gain improvement unusable for a higher number of channels and high-quality applications such as music reproduction. This paper proposes alternatively time-varying mixing matrices, which is an efficient algorithm corresponding to symmetric up and down frequency shifting. It is shown with a statistical approach that time-varying mixing matrices can as well achieve maximum stability improvement for a higher number of channels. A listening test demonstrates the improved quality of time-varying mixing matrices over frequency shifting.