Spatial audio and sensory evaluation techniques – context, history and aims

Spatial sound reproduction gives rise to new challenges for those trying to evaluate sensory features contributing to perceived quality. Recent technical developments have enabled the delivery of sophisticated multichannel audio signals to consumers, over links that range very widely in quality, requiring decisions to be made about the tradeoffs between different aspects of audio quality. Spatial factors can account for as much as a third of overall ratings of sound quality in listening tests and must therefore be considered seriously in systems and tests that evaluate sound quality. It is therefore important to determine the most important spatial quality attributes of reproduced sound fields and to find ways of predicting perceived sound quality on the basis of objective measurements.