Improvement of acoustic feedback stability by bandwidth compression and expansion

Both shifiting the input signal's frequencies by a fixed frequency and compressing the input signal's bandwidth have been known to be effective in improving the stability margin of public adress systems operating in reverberant spaces. This paper describes the effect of an alternative approach of improving the acoustic-feedback stability and yet maintaining speech inteligibility by bandwidth compression and expansion. Conditions are derived for this technizue to be realized and an experimental system has been made - up. A series of experiments has been performed in small spaces and the results have shown that more than 5dB improvement can be obtained in the stability margin.