Sound‐image broadening by a single echo and its relation to the transient interaural cross‐correlation function

The sounds reproduced by two loudspeakers often consist of a preceding sound and its echo when the listener’s position is offset like the position of a driver when listening to a car stereo. Consequently, the sound image is broadened by the echo. In this article, the width of the sound image produced by the preceding sound and the echo under a loudness balance condition were examined. TRICC (the maximum value of the transient interaural cross‐correlation function) was then applied to analyze such sound image broadening. In hearing experiments, a pair of noise bursts was used as a model of transient sound, such as speeches and musical sounds. A pointer noise (a pair of noises with correlation coefficients) was used to express the width of the sound image. The experiments showed that the width of the sound image increases as delay time between the preceding sound and the echo increases. When the delay time becomes longer than 10 ms, the width of the sound image corresponds to the value of the interaural cor...