Comparative measurements of loudspeakers in a listening situation

• DOI: 10.1121/1.2816571
• Publication Date: 2008-01-04T23:32:17Z
• Authors: Mathieu Lavandier; Philippe Herzog; Sabine Meunier
• Keywords: Signal processing; Signal Detection, Psychological; Monaural; Auditory perception; 03 medical and health sciences; Acoustic transducers; Audiometry; Psychophysics; Humans; Sound production technology; Pitch Perception; Acoustic measurements and instrumentation; [SPI.ACOU]Engineering Sciences [physics]/Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; [SPI.ACOU] Engineering Sciences [physics]/Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; Amplifiers, Electronic; Audiology; Acoustics; [PHYS.MECA.ACOU]Physics [physics]/Mechanics [physics]/Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; Auditory Perception; Auditory system; Microphones; [PHYS.MECA.ACOU] Physics [physics]/Mechanics [physics]/Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; 0305 other medical science; 43.38.Md, 43.58.Kr, 43.20.Ye, 43.66.Lj

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.