Perceptual Assessment of Loudspeaker Performance; A Comparison of In-Situ and Binaural Evaluation Methods

Abstract

In practical industrial scenarios, conducting in-situ listening evaluations is often difficult due to limitations in environment and experimental conditions. As a result, recorded audio is frequently used as an alternative for subjective loudspeaker evaluation, although its perceptual validity remains unclear. This study investigates whether simplified binaural recordings can preserve subjective loud speaker evaluation trends observed under direct listening conditions. Subjective listening experiments were conducted using three loudspeakers with different spectral characteristics and four representative audio signals under both in-situ listening and binaural playback conditions. Pairwise comparison and ranking analyses were used to evaluate perceptual consistency between the two listening conditions. The results show that binaural playback was generally able to preserve the subjective evaluation trends observed in direct listening experiments, particularly for bass and music signals. Additional experiments under background noise conditions further demonstrated that perceptual discriminability between loudspeakers decreased as noise level increased. Based on the validated binaural recordings, this study further proposed several spectral perceptual models linking spectral characteristics with subjective perception. Model-guided spectral modification experiments showed that the predicted perceptual tendencies were generally consistent with listeners’ evaluations. Overall, the results suggest that simplified binaural recordings can preserve perceptually relevant loudspeaker information to a considerable extent and may provide a practical alternative to large-scale in-situ listening tests during loudspeaker evaluation and design.