Comparative measurements of loudspeakers in a listening situation

J Acoust Soc Am. 2008 Jan;123(1):77-87. doi: 10.1121/1.2816571.

Abstract

Comparison of loudspeakers is a major concern during design or product selection. There are several standards for the measurement of loudspeaker characteristics, but none of them provides hints for a rigorous comparison between devices. In this study, different ways of evaluating acoustical dissimilarity between loudspeakers were compared. Several methods of signal analysis were used, and for each method a metric evaluating the dissimilarity between two signals was defined. The correlation between the different dissimilarity evaluations over a significant panel of loudspeakers led to identified classes of measurements. A specific aspect of this work is that measurements were performed in a standard listening environment, rather than in an anechoic or reverberant one. It allowed the use of the recorded signals for a simple listening test, providing a perceptual metric which was compared to the acoustical ones. It also allowed the introduction of auditory models in the computation of some acoustical metrics, so defining a new class of measurements which gave results close to the perceptual ones.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics* / instrumentation
  • Amplifiers, Electronic*
  • Auditory Perception*
  • Humans
  • Pitch Perception*
  • Psychophysics / methods
  • Signal Detection, Psychological