• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.19 no.7
• /
• pp.66-76
• /
• 2000

Acoustic performance of loudspeakers for sound reproduction has been qualitatively evaluated by using the listening test by juries in the development and final evaluation stages. However, the subjective evaluation method has many problems in the viewpoint of reliability and repeatability that are mainly related to the jury performance, as well as time and economy. In this reason, objective techniques should be tried to evaluate the acoustic performance of loudspeakers as well as the conventional subjective test. The object of this study is to find if there is any correlation between the statistically treated in test results and the measured results based on the loudness of reproduced sound signals. For the four-step statistical analysis, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukeys method are employed for dealing with the data from the listening test. For the objective evaluation, Zwickers loudness considering the human hearing characteristics is calculated for the measured sound signal emitted from each loudspeaker and the objective ratings such as fidelity rating (FR) and softness rating (SR) is suggested. The correlation between two ratings has been demonstrated for an actual set of loudspeakers using FR, SR and correlation coefficient. The method in this study can be useful in statistically evaluating commercial or prototype loudspeakers without using very time-consuming and expensive subjective testing.