title: Comparative measurements of loudspeakers in a listening situation.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique, C.N.R.S. UPR 7051, 31 Chemin Joseph Aiguier, 13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France. lavandiermn@cardiff.ac.uk
authors.forename: Mathieu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lavandier
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Herzog
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meunier
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation; D000669:Amplifiers, Electronic; D001307:Auditory Perception; D006801:Humans; D010898:Pitch Perception; D011601:Psychophysics / Q000379:methods; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological