A new interpretation of distortion artifacts in sweep measurements

The characterization of acoustical spaces by means of impulse response measurements is often biased by the nonlinear behavior of the loudspeaker used to excite the system under test. In this context the distortion immunity provided by the sweep technique has been investigated. The results show that the sweep method can reject a significant amount of distortion artifacts but, in contrast to what is claimed in the literature, it cannot exclude all distortion artifacts from the causal part of the estimated impulse response.