The design, implementation, and performance of a low‐cost, real‐time DSP system for source location is discussed. The system consists of an eight‐element electret microphone array connected to a Signalogic DSP daughterboard hosted by a PC. The system determines the location of a speaker in the audience in an irregularly shaped auditorium. The auditorium presents a nonideal acoustical environment; some of the walls are acoustically treated but there still exist significant reverberation and a large amount of low‐frequency noise from fans in the ceiling. The source location algorithm is implemented in a two‐step process: The first step determines time delay of arrival (TDOA) for select microphone pairs. A modified version of the cross‐power spectrum phase method [M. Omologo and P. Svaizer, Proceedings of IEEE ICASSP 1994 (IEEE, New York, 1994), pp. II273–II276] is used to compute TDOAs and is implemented on the DSP daughterboard. The second step uses the computed TDOAs in a least‐mean‐square gradient descen...