Patent ID: 7110551

Claim:
A personal active noise attenuating system comprising: a heteronomous electronic controller and a control actuator comprising a radius of reverberation; a first and second electro-acoustic transducer mounted on opposite sides of a head support structure; a first actuator located adjacent to the first electro-acoustic transducer and a second actuator located adjacent to the second transducer, wherein the first and second electro-acoustic transducers define a zone of reverberation on each side of the support structure adjacent a wearer's ears, wherein the first and second electro-acoustic transducers are each adapted to be movable within said zones so as to provide an unchanging-transfer function estimate for a filtered reference which does not need to be updated, and whereby a transfer function is identified for all frequencies within the control bandwidth and thus is specified independent of the nature of the disturbance signal; an adaptive feedforward component utilizing the transfer function estimate for the heteronomous electronic controller which is adapted to attenuate tonal noises, and a feedback component of the heteronomous electronic controller which is adapted to attenuate broadband noises; and a linear combiner adapted for summing a linear combination of the adaptive feedward component and the feedback component so as to generate a heteronomous control signal.