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The woofer in a car should be large to cover the low frequencies, so it is heavy and needs an ample space to be installed in a passenger car. The geometry of the woofer should conform to the limited available space and layout in general. In many cases, the passengers feel that the low-frequency contents are not satisfactory although the speaker specification covers the low frequencies. In this work, a thin panel is installed between the roof liner and the roof panel, and it is used as the woofer. The vibration field is controlled by many small actuators to create the speaker and baffle zones to avoid the sound distortion due to the modal interaction. The generation of speaker and baffle zones follows the inverse vibro-acoustic rendering technique. In the actual implementation, a thin acrylic plate of 0.53x0.2 m2 is used as the radiator panel, and the control actuator array is composed of 16 moving-coil actuators.

To hear the powerful and spectrally rich sound in a car is costly, because the usual car audio system adopts small loudspeakers. Also, the available positions of the loudspeakers are limited, that may cause the reactive effect from the backing cavity and the sound distortion. In this work, a part of the roof panel of a passenger car is controlled by array actuators to convert the specified large area to be a woofer. An analogous concept of the acoustic holography is employed to be projected as the basic concept of an inverse rendering for achieving a desired vibration field. The vibration of the radiating zone is controlled to be in a uniform phase, and the other parts outside it are to be made a no-change zone in vibration. The latter becomes a baffle for the woofer, and the backing cavity is virtually infinite if the sound radiation into the passenger cabin is only of concern. Small array actuators are located in the periphery of the target roof panel avoiding the stiffener members.