The safe and stable operation of substation is very important. Whether the power equipment is at abnormal operation condition can be judged by way of analyzing the variation of the audible sound characteristics of the equipment in substation. The active location of abnormal sound source can quickly determine the fault section

and thus improve the detection efficiency of abnormal sound. In practical application

the small snapshot system with large array is often used due to the requirements of accuracy and real-time

which makes the traditional sound location methods not effectively distinguish multiple targets when the sound source angles are close. According to the random matrix theory

a sound source location method based on uniform plane matrix is proposed. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrix are corrected by Stieltjes transform

and then the abnormal sound source is located through the spectral peak search of spatial spectrum

which can effectively improve the success rate of distinguishing adjacent sound sources. The research results show that the proposed method can use less snapshots to distinguish adjacent sound sources

and the resolution success rate is effectively improved.