The fascinating concept of active sound control had to go a long way from being an amazing idea first, attracting increasing experimental curiosity and substantial investigative energy later, then doing hard in coping with excessive promises and finally gaining and justifying confidence as a reliable and solid engineering tool for appropriate, fitting applications.
By tracing back and reviewing the important steps in researching and developing the approach of controlling sound fields by generating and superposing specific additional fields, the paper demonstrates the chances as well as the natural performance limits of this concept. These limits may be distinguished as being due to principal physical or particular technical, i.e. actor, computational, signal processing and conceptual limitations.
Based on these considerations an overview of present state of the art will show that apart from trying to reduce the limitations recent work strongly focuses on adapting and applying the method as reliable, robust and affordable technology in real world applications. Based on the evidence given for recent automotive series implementations, the paper will conclude by assessing present successes and future potential of active sound control technology with particular emphasis on automotive applications.