In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse and present the state-of-the-art sound reproduction systems. This work is the result of extensive literature on the various types of sound or acoustic synthesis, and production and reproduction techniques. It is shown that combination of digital signal processing (DSP) approaches can help improve the overall system performance. Compensation techniques have also been applied to reduce the chances of occurrence of errors, artifacts and inaccuracies in sound field reproduction; deficiencies that often result from factors such as deficiencies in the rendering techniques and the effect of listening environment. These techniques, including multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channel inversion, and multi-point controlled wavefront synthesis, perform either partial or full compensation of sound field. It was found that multichannel wave field synthesis (MWFS), as a non-destructive testing approach, demonstrates a unified solution comprising of MIMO channel inversion and WFS, with the ability to satisfactorily reproduce the sound field in a large area, with compensation factors such as reflection, various room effects and spatial aliasing.