The relationship between basic audio quality and overall listening experience

Abstract

Basic audio quality (BAQ) is a well-known perceptual attribute, which is rated in various listening test methods to measure the performance of audio systems. Unfortunately, when it comes to purchasing audio systems, BAQ might not have a significant influence on the customers' buying decisions since other factors, like brand loyalty, might be more important. In contrast to BAQ, overall listening experience (OLE) is an affective attribute which incorporates all aspects that are important to an individual assessor, including his or her preference for music genre and audio quality. In this work, the relationship between BAQ and OLE is investigated in more detail. To this end, an experiment was carried out, in which participants rated the BAQ and the OLE of music excerpts with different timbral and spatial degradations. In a between-group-design procedure, participants were assigned into two groups, in each of which a different set of stimuli was rated. The results indicate that rating of both attributes, BAQ and OLE, leads to similar rankings, even if a different set of stimuli is rated. In contrast to the BAQ ratings, which were more influenced by timbral than spatial degradations, the OLE ratings were almost equally influenced by timbral and spatial degradations.

The role of human influence factors on overall listening experience

“…Furthermore, comparisons between OLE and basic audio quality have been made [27] in which it was seen that OLE can produce comparable results to basic audio quality.…”

“…those who chose 'not at all' or 'very much' most frequently) would potentially be limited in expressing improvements or deterioration due to the processing in comparison to their BIRs, i.e. floor and ceiling effects, as further discussed in [27]. It could therefore be expected that by including such participants, the difference in OLE ratings with respect to the different quality levels would be reduced and also that any correlations relating item ratings to quality levels would be weakened.…”

“…Overall listening experience is an affective measure recently used and defined by Schoeffler and Herre [1] that is inspired Fig. 1 Factors influencing QoE can be grouped into system, context and human influence factors.…”

“…One evaluation measure that has been introduced with the aim of evaluating audio technology with a QoE mindset is overall listening experience (OLE) [1]. This is an affective measure that is intended to include all possible factors that may influence listeners' ratings of stimuli, for example the song, lyrics, technical audio quality, the listeners mood and the reproduction system.…”

“…Likewise, if it was known that the overall listening experience of a different user group is highly influenced by the content, it would be less problematic if the quality was reduced. In this paper, an experimental study is presented with the aim of identifying psychographic 1 variables that significantly influence whether a listener is heavily influenced by content or quality when making OLE ratings. As well as having direct applications, such as those mentioned above, this study provides insight into how human factors can influence quality of experience in general.…”