Active noise control can be a powerful tool when dealing with problematic low frequencies tones or general broadband noise. The primary goal of this paper is to expose the design methods and analyze the performance measurements of a...
moreActive noise control can be a powerful tool when dealing with problematic low frequencies tones or general broadband noise. The primary goal of this paper is to expose the design methods and analyze the performance measurements of a low-cost (Arduino compatible) active noise control system for headphones. The measured performance was impaired by the poor coupling between the headphone and the pinna of the head and torso simulator used in the measurements. For this reason, the complete measurement set was carried out with and without the artificial pinna (in this first step only the results without the pinna are discussed). The algorithm used for this research was the FXLMS (Filtered Least Mean Squared), which is a variation of the Least Mean Square algorithm (LMS). Although the system was designed to attenuate broadband noise, great results were obtained for both broadband and tonal noise, showing that is possible to adapt a headphone to substantially attenuate noise with relatively low-cost components and easy to use microcontrollers.
