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Evaluation of Sound Quality, Boominess, and Boxiness in Small Rooms

The acoustics of small rooms have been studied with emphasis on sound quality, boominess, and boxiness when the rooms are used for speech or music. Seven rooms with very different characteristics were used for the study. Subjective listening tests were made using binaural recordings of studio-produced music and anechoic speech. The test results were compared with a large number of objective acoustic parameters based on the frequencydependent reverberation times (RT) measured in the rooms. This has led to the proposal of three new acoustic parameters, which have shown high correlation with the subjective ratings. The classical bass ratio definitions showed poor correlation with all subjective ratings. The overall sound quality ratings gave different results for speech and music. For speech the preferred mean RT should be as low as possible, whereas for music a preferred range of between 0.3 and 0.5 s was found.

Authors: Weisser, Adam; Rindel, Jens Holger
Affiliation: Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
JAES Volume 54 Issue 6 pp. 495-511; June 2006 Import into BibTeX

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