Abstract: With an improved experimental setup for AE (acoustic emission), the AE measurement was carried out for the specimens of anisotropic granite in the deformations/failure process under uniaxial compression. Discusses the initiation of microcracks thus induced and their interaction and propagation during damage/failure. A relative source locating method was introduced into the study on the AE occurrences in anisotropic and heterogeneous rock specimens, which is less dependent on sounding wave velocity. The results showed that the method is available to AE occurrences in complex specimens and engineering rock mass with higher reliability and accuracy than before. And it can offer preliminarily a quantitative analysis of locating the source of rock failure process under the action of external loading, thus benefiting the analyses of other failures of engineering rock mass.