A performance comparison of Home Usage Testing and Central Location Testing in small impairment listening tests

The performance of listening tests can be a laborious process and requires significant preparation and control to ensure good data quality . This is particularly true for sm all impairment listening tes ts perform ed in accordance to recommendation ITU-R BS.1116-1 [ 1] in dedicated listening rooms under calibrated conditions. The us age of s uch central location testing (CLT) methods is time consuming, costly and limited to the physical location. An alternative type of test is the home usage testing (HUT) whereby the assessors evaluate a product in normal usage at home, as commonly encountered in consumer evaluations. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the two methods in a small impairment study of audio codec performance.