Sean Olive

A comparison of listener loudspeaker preference ratings based on insitu versus auralized presentations of the loudspeakers

Auralization methods have several practical and methodological advantages for studying the perception of loudspeaker reproduction in rooms. For subjective measurements of loudspeakers, the auralization should be capable of eliciting the same sound quality ratings as those measured using an original acoustic presentation of a loudspeaker. An experiment was designed to test whether this is possible. Listeners gave preference ratings for both acoustic (in situ) and auralized double‐blind presentations of four different loudspeakers, and the results were compared. The auralized presentations were generated from binaural room‐scanned impulse responses of the loudspeakers convolved with the music test signals and presented over headphones equipped with a head‐tracking device. For both in situ and auralized methods nine trained listeners gave preference ratings for four different loudspeakers using four different programs with one repeat (eight trials in total). The results show that the auralized and in situ pr...