Multi-channel wireless hybrid active noise control with fixed-adaptive control selection

Active noise control (ANC) is now a must-have feature in various headphones to attenuate unwanted external noise leaked into the headphones. The conventional ANC headphone typically uses an earcup-mounted reference microphone to pick up the reference signal and send it to the chip’s control filter, which generates anti-noise inside the earcup to destructively interfere with the leaky noise signal. Previously, a novel type of wireless feedforward ANC structure was devised to achieve greater noise reduction by acquiring a higher reference-to-interference ratio. To further reduce computational complexity and relax causality constraints over traditional ANC algorithms, a modification to this structure is proposed that employs a hybrid feedforward–feedback structure in conjunction with a fixed-adaptive control selection (FAS). Furthermore, numerical simulations and real-time experiments are performed in this paper to validate the effectiveness of the wireless hybrid ANC with the FAS technique.