On-demand Webinar: Sound Quality Fundamentals
Sound quality is an important aspect of product design and development. It acts as a brand differentiator and can strongly affect the consumers’ preference towards your product. Take the example of a car: while it should be durable and efficient, the sounds that it makes can often influence the buying decision. The same is true for a wide range of products, mainly in the consumer goods industry. This is why I’ve decided to record a free, on-demand webinar to talk about how we hear sounds, and why our ears are not exactly a class 1 type microphone.
Microphone vs. your ear, who will win?
The challenge with psychoacoustic analysis is that perceived sound quality is strongly related to the human hearing. The mechanism of the human auditory system differs from one of the most common acoustic test equipment, a microphone. A microphone can measure the sound pressure levels (SPL), but will not take into account the subjective preference of a human brain towards, for example, an SPL with less energy in the high-frequency ranges. Acoustic engineers need to apply a process that addresses these aspects to improve their product’s sound design.
Sound quality process
A typical sound quality process starts with binaural acoustic measurements. The collected data is analyzed by means of objective and subjective evaluations. In order to objectively rank and rate sounds, engineers use sound quality metrics. These metrics are often based on the psychoacoustic theory, which takes the mechanisms of the human auditory system into account. A parallel subjective evaluation, such as a jury testing procedure, helps to further link preferences for certain sounds with design variants or benchmarked solutions.
Join the webinar now!
This on-demand webinar will help you to understand how the human hearing works, which is the first step towards implementing a sound quality evaluation process into your product development cycle. It will help you design a strong, successful product with its own compelling acoustic signature.
Subscribe to the webinar here!
Key Take-Aways:
- Learn why sound quality is important
- Discover how the human auditory system works
- Understand the differences between a “class-one” microphone and our ears
- Learn how different sensory phenomena affect what we hear
